poetry

Anxiety

Sally

Moms tend to worry, you
know. It’s what we do
best. Especially
when a little chick
flies from the nest across
a pond — THE pond. So quick-
ly she had gone from
little girl to adult, and just
like that she flew
to London, thrust
into problem-solving far
from home where I
cannot rescue her ’cause
she must learn to fly
on her own —

To hear her voice
and see her face
— the magic of
technology —
took the worry
from my anxious
heart (thank you, God!)


Daughter #3 flew to London for a semester. While I was busy grousing about driving in New Jersey, she was boarding a plane.

We thought we had checked everything, but when she arrived at Heathrow, she found that her international phone plane with Verizon did not work. Of course, it was the middle of the night and I didn’t see her message until I got up an hour later.

I couldn’t reach her. A thousand thoughts — most of them involving disaster — raced through my mind.

When I heard her voice, I finally exhaled.

This is my response to the W3 challenge this week:

Write a jamb-jitsu. What’s a jamb jitsu, you ask?

  • Two stanzas (S1 and S2) with three rules:
    1. S1 must have more lines than S2;
    2. ALL lines of S1 must employ enjambment;
      • Enjambment is: the running-over of a sentence or phrase from one poetic line to the next, without terminal punctuation;
    3. ALL lines of S2 must have the same number of syllables
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Published by Sally

10 thoughts on “Anxiety”

  4. Sally, your portrayal of a mother’s transition from worry to relief through the use of technology is sweet, and you’re really good at effectively conveying the emotions of the moment.

    ~David

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