Poetry may be based on a real life experience or one’s imagination or a combination of the two.
Take a look at Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s oil painting, Ecce Ancilla Domini (The Annunciation):
As those of you who visit on a regular basis know, every month (okay, nearly every month) I write a little background on one of the poems in my first collection, Watercolors. If you haven’t got it, it’s free. You can download it at Smashwords by clicking on the cover on the right or here at Barnes & Noble. By all means, write a review.
Anyway, our poem this month is The Final Embrace. It’s about learning of the illness that would eventually take my dad’s life and journeying back to him.
Before I got the news, I was sitting in my apartment, which had a wonderful view of the sea and listening to James Taylor’s Sweet Baby James. Because I didn’t have a phone (At the time, the waiting list for one was something like eight years.), my mom had called my next door neighbor.
Living in a relatively small city, I had to fly out from a larger one about two hours away. It was before the days of the Internet so I had booked my tickets through a travel agent. Unfortunately, I had found a very greedy one. While in the street with my suitcase waiting for my taxi, someone from the travel agency told me they’d made a mistake in the pricing and needed more money. I thought I’ll give you whatever you want – I’m not going to argue. And I thought how I would give all the money I had if only my dad would be well again.
Watercolors is free today through Friday.
I hope you’ll get it, read it, and if so inclined, review it.
Tom Simard 