Birth of the Artist
poem by Amy Watkins

My sister died when I was ten years old.
You ask if I became a writer to make sense
of it, but I can’t say. I know it makes no sense.
I know that on that day the world cracked open
like a horrible piñata, bleeding
the cheapest little trinkets—all the secrets
the grown ups knew—and I was one of those
children who snatched them up, so maybe
I was a poet already. I remember
the vague idea of saying something perfect
that would write me into the family lore
like the cousin who fainted at her murdered sister’s
grave, whispering, We can’t just leave her
to get rained on. I know that everything I said
was wrong and worse dishonest. I know
that poets don’t care about saying the right
thing, only what is true, sometimes shocking,
sometimes selfish. I know that I began
to understand: the first act of art is survival.

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This entry was posted on June 10, 2010 at 3:10 am and is filed under Beginnings, Beginnings & Endings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.