Veering slightly off-prompt again today, to write my true emotions, thanking my mother for her example rather than anything specific she taught me to do. Our old house just went up for sale again, and I’m having feelings.

Poem prompt: “Today’s daily resource is the Uffizi Gallery, in Florence, Italy. If you are at all interested in Renaissance Italian masters, it’s the right place to get an eyeful of Titians, Caravaggios, Botticellis, Canallettos, and da Vincis.

And now for today’s optional prompt! Did you take music lessons as a child? Despite having all the musical talent of a dried-out lemon, I took two years of piano lessons. I was required to practice for half an hour a day, and showed my disgruntlement by playing certain very annoying songs – like Turkey in the Straw – over and over, as loudly as possible. But while I thought of the lessons as a kind of torture, I’m glad as an adult to have taken them – if only for the greater dexterity it gave to my hands!

In her poem, Thanking My Mother for Piano Lessons, Diane Wakoski is far more grateful than I ever managed to be, describing the act of playing as a ‘relief’ from loneliness and worry, and as enlarging her life with something beautiful. Today, we’d like to challenge you to write a poem about something you’ve done – whether it’s music lessons, or playing soccer, crocheting, or fishing, or learning how to change a tire – that gave you a similar kind of satisfaction, and perhaps still does.”

Cotton Candy Wall

It’s been painted over in boring beige:
the wall my headboard told its secrets to.

Mom, I rolled my eyes at you so many times;
the photo you took was no exception,
interrupting the fictionalized diary of Cleopatra 
without consent to capture me on my back.
I felt violated, but no, that’s not what you were doing, 
it was the wall,

the wall separating us from his living space,
his sitting space, his napping space, his TV room, 
the wall blocking the room where he would no longer live—
thank you. 

Thank you for sponge-painting accents
to distract you from your widowing grief.
The cottony clouds of rose, sage, and shell 
sent us both to Candy-land. I hold in my hand
evidence of the journey. The house since sold
is on the market again, and I see my old
bedroom, the walls re-pathetic…

at least I have picture proof. Thank you
for modeling Miss Independent
to a young teen who learned from her father
men will laze, lie, and willingly die
rather than move a muscle at home.
The shelves he built for his young daughters
are long gone. Now I build my own.