A Writing Experiment

            I began writing today by using one word, “she”. (I do that at times to see where only one word will take me.) I added a bit more. “She is fourteen.”

“And what about her?” I asked myself.

“She is fourteen and in love for the first time . . . or so she thinks.”

 I had planned to write a narrative piece -- a simple, little scenario, but somehow it morphed into a free verse poem about a fourteen-year-old girl falling in love with the face of a boy in a photograph. Here is the result.

On Thinking Fourteen

She is fourteen and in love for the first time

Or so she thinks.

“How can one love a face in a photograph?”

She is asked.

“And why?”

No answer. No clue.

“He has nice eyes, crystalline blue,”

She notes to no one.

“I can see into his soul,” she says,   

And believes.

The slightest smile plays about his mouth,

And his lips are parted, ready,

Toying with her.

“I taste them,” she cries.

Square jawed, scantily whiskered,

He stares at her, unmoving.

Yet she is stirred,

Enticed, engrossed,

Lost in illusion

Of what would be.

“If only he could come to me.”

It will not happen though.

For he is mute, blind, cold, detached.

And when she touches him at last

The feeling falls flat.

She is not disappointed though,

 “Is it so bad?” she asks.

“I’ve only created what cannot be,

Can never ever be for me.”

Or so she thinks,

For chance and hope, entwined, combined

Are a fantasy feigned by one fourteen.

                                                                        Judith DeChesere-Boyle, April 2015