by Riley O’Connell ’15

In the beginning, it was humming,
bubblegum laughter and guitar strumming,
the whisper-drag of sock-swathed feet,
the squeaky two-step of your soccer cleats.
It was the jagged stitches in my head
from when you pushed me off the bed,
and sometimes it was late at night,
a knock on the wall, out of sight.
Like a mother to her child, or a guy to his girl,
when you could no longer illuminate my world,
poetry offered me its warm winter coat,
and when you were gone, it was poetry I wrote.
So don’t be alarmed at the stacks upon stacks
of rhyme, meter, metaphor, to close up the cracks
that were left when you left, because, God, can’t you see?
All along it was poetry, you and me.