Is it me
Or not me?
It’s plain to see
It mimics me.
Then sometimes
It’s never there
Am I still here?
A thought I cannot bear
The other day
To my dismay
My shadow was there
But no sign of me?
My destiny.
My shadow and I,
We like to play,
Run and jump,
It’s just,
That I rue the day,
My shadow leaves,
And I’m a lump of dust.
Our favorite game is hide and seek,
At noon I never find him,
If I lay on the grass,
He’s nowhere to be found,
He’s never around,
On a cloudy day.
At night he’s creepy eerie,
As I walk the walk
Among the staccato-ed
Street lamps.
On a sunny day,
If I stand up,
And point due north,
My shadow can rhyme,
The time.
My shadow,
Can tell the seasons.
I juke and switch,
I zip one way,
Then ‘thuther,
My shadow struggles,
To keep pace,
With my antics,
And my troubles.
Dejected,
Ticked off,
With my stupid game of off,
My shadow to my dismay,
Just upped and waltzed away,
One day.
Come back!
Come back!
You shadow you!
I must have you,
Through and through,
Without you, you see,
You shadow you,
Without you,
I’m not me.
For you see,
What’s so neat,
Is I’m not complete,
Without my shadow,
Dark quiet, quite discreet.
My shadow came out
With me one pine-tree-splitting night
It froze to the hoarfrost
And hain’t been seen since*
So I leave the light on,
Wherein I sleep,
For my shadow friend,
I want to keep.
Sun and light,
Are my shadow’s dream.
Without a shadow,
Incomplete I’d seem.
Every body’s got‘s to have a shadow?
Where’s your shadow?
*Those of you’s know’s me, can appreciate why, whilst sitting by the fire one mid-winter’s night, I came to add this single stanza a few months after first posting “Shadow.” I had just re-read Sandburg’s “They have yarns” in his Harvest Poems. Sandburg’s prose ain’t poetry and his poems are non-rhyming prose. But it works!
What y’all also might wanna know is that my poems are dynamic ever changing; that is, I quite often go back and change a poem until that sad day when it gets published in print.
Photo of my shadow diligently guarding my Appalachian grave somewheres along the Appalachian Trail, telling time for passers by, and telling a story or two about it and I, and that sad day for him, the sunny day I died😉
Key Words: shadow, still hear, destiny, shadow leaves, dust, noon, lay, cloudy, staccato, due north, rhyme nor rhythm, my troubles, waltzed, not complete, leave the light on, Where’s your shadow?
tom tenbrunsel
Poet Laureate in Appalachia