You want to steal a poem I took from the air,

That flew too close to me

And got tangled in my hair?

I wrote them all down in one year

During the peanut harvest.

Just after the first frost,

We'd dig the peanuts.

I'd write the poems in the peanut dust in the air,

The dust so thick you could cut it with a knife.

I was five.

Many of the words I didn't really understand,

But they would land in my head

And I would kind of understand them,

And the air would air them,

And the sand would sand them,

Until they got into my mouth

And I ate them with handfuls

Of raw peanuts, because there 

Were so many of them,

The poems and the peanuts,

And hardly any much of all of nothin else.

Then the government invented a word

Called subsidies,

And they paid peanut farmers not to grow peanuts,

And so then there really was nothing.

But there was still air,

And poems floating everywhere,

And now I was six,

So I wrote the poems down 

All across our land with sticks,

Right there in the sand

Where the peanuts used to grow.

So now you know

How I started writing poems.

-jenn