This is a sort of coming-of-age poem based on a dimly-remembered event that occurred thirty-four years ago, on the eve of my 17^th birthday. I almost certainly wrote about it at the time, but my adolescent poems have long-since been lost—there was no cyberspace back then for them to be forever engraved on—and that is probably for the best. This is, therefore, an attempt to recreate an adolescent poem at the age of 51. It fits roughly into Mara Eastern’s Poetry 101 Rehab Recycle and Couple categories. http://maraeastern.com/2015/05/11/poetry-101-rehab-recycle/

First Crush

Birmingham was not quite the right place for it,

though the campus was leafy and lush

and the scent of Mayflowers graced

the still not too starkly sunlit air.

The nervous girl with a crucifix and a low-cut dress

And I chatted awkwardly between lectures.

Ovid’s Amores was possibly not the best choice of topic.

Driving back, my parents had another horrid row

About nothing, and the heavens were split open by a thunderstorm,

As they had been, I am told, the evening I was born.

I tilted my forehead forward against the cooling car window

And mirrored the clinging rivulets of raindrops with quiet tears.

I never knew her name.