The First Hundred Years
In the beginning, I was pretty much nothing
and there was pretty much nothing to speak of
so the first thing I created was a library so I could
check out books on poetry and gourmet cooking and
even one on how to make gun powder. That last one
proved to be not as useful as I expected, but you live
and you learn. Then came family and friends and
high school so I'd have a place to put all of the
poetry that had started pouring out of the pen
I'd invented onto the notebook paper I'd invented,
the paper with the blue lines and the holes punched
along one side. Then there was the practice teacher
in English class, the one with the permanently red hair,
and the American history teacher who made me
write a song about the environment after I'd created
her. Then I had to invent the high school literary
magazine to send the poems to and then the college
where I was unhappy most of the time. You'd think
I could have come up with a better idea for higher ed.
And later, I had to invent death for my mother, then
death for my father, and that was hard, too, and then
I had to invent marriage and divorce and marriage and
parenthood and divorce again and then I had to make
this poem and then I had to invent you so I could read
it to you. You. You're the best I’ve done so far.
H. K. Stewart