Speak to Me Sunday: Write Me a Poem

His name was Cameron.

Nestled among vendors selling grilled kebabs and beaded pens and farm-grown vegetables, his booth had a quietness about it.

A chair and table. An honest-to-goodness typewriter. A banner that read: I’ll write you a poem!

How, I ask, could I not be intrigued?

And so, I let him write me a poem.

At first, he sat with his fingers poised over the keyboard, contemplating our conversation about writing and poetry and love of travel. When he began to type, among the market noises of conversation, laughter, and a musician with a microphone, there was the staccato tapping of an honest-to-goodness typewriter.

Later, when he handed me the finished poem, I recognized the vulnerability of having a stranger read something you had just written, and I respected him for it; there is also vulnerability in having a writer watching you read it.

But that is what poetry does, it pulls you out of yourself, and there was an awareness about his finished poem, an intuitiveness because it was so … me.

We had not talked about my love of books, but his poem mentioned me as both a reader and a writer. I did not tell him about my two-shoebox-full postcard collection, or that I use postcards as travel journals, but he somehow knew. I did not mention that given a choice between the beach or mountains I would pick mountains every single time, and yet it was in the mountains his poem placed me.

But that is another thing poetry does, it creates magic. For there, among vendors selling grilled kebabs and beaded pens and farm-grown vegetables, I found a poet.

His name was Cameron.

And he wrote me a poem.

my poem