Poetry Thursday - Time

This came to me as I was walking down the street with Small Boy in the stroller on the way to play group. Naturally it was the one time in one hundred I left the house without a notebook, because I figured I was just walking to play group and then afterwards we have to come right home for lunch and a nap. I knew the poem would never hold through the play group, so I called home and left it on my answering machine to transcribe later. Good thing it was a short one! Or maybe the circumstances made it short. I once read (in Writing Down the Bones, perhaps?) that William Carlos Williams wrote many of his poems on prescription pads and thus they are short - form following function, as it were. Maybe that is the case here. At any rate, here is a poem about stealing minutes that came to me, interestingly enough, in a stolen minute of walking down the street on the way to a child's play group.

**

I steal minutes like a magpie
Bright and shiny hoarded against the future
Like new pennies in a child’s pocket they beg to be spent
But what is worth this treasure?

I spend them not, I line my nest.
Silly magpie.

**

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