“I want to see all the things, do all the things and be all the things up in the blue, blue sky.”
I was seven years old when I wrote that, what I called a poem, sitting on the top of the radiator in my parents’ bedroom. I was about that same age when I looked up my first word in the dictionary. I did it by flipping the pages, picked the page, and let my finger land on a word. From that time forward, a word meant freedom to me. Nobody could take it away or make me change it unless I chose to.
What was that first word? I have never forgotten. In fact, I have a ridiculous love for it. It was “Lazar:” An infectious and loathsome disease. “ As you can see, I have never forgotten it, even when I learned that it was a copycat word, having gotten its meaning from the Bible.
As I got older, more words poured in and out of me. As my mother, bourbon in hand, would quote Shakespeare with words like, “…He who steals my good name steals trash…. “ Years later in college I felt very familiar with the old favorite quotes
And, then there was the time I was reading the brilliant Charlton Ogburn about the name Shakespeare being phony and hiding the real genius of those words. The true author is safe, because nobody cares any more. I was in a book store asking for his book, when the clerk said in rebuff, “Nobody cares about that anymore.” Just me. I still cared. Some of the most important things in the world are not cared about anymore, hidden from all of us by sheer blindness.
The ten books I have written so far saw the light of day only because they pushed themselves out of my consciousness. They came out of sometimes unpopular places, willing to be born whether I liked it or not, like a recalciitrant fetus. I did get satisfaction for their birthing, when I got pleasure from the synthetic murders I committed on the pages.
Care helps also. The more I care, the more I have to investigate something deeper. I think I was really meant for poetry. So why did I write only forty-nine poems? I liked the words forty-nine. They are so odd and overlooked, those words.
I ask you, if you are in the business, please use words to bring out the unseen, the odd and the overlooked. That way, we all can thrive.
Cynthia Hearne Darling
2025
