October

In two days I'll be forty-nine. (Just a few days ago, I discovered I share a birthday with Javier Milei, the President of Argentina.)

When I was sixteen, my family got a computer for the first time. It was a second-hand machine that my father was given by a bank, to help him with creating his community magazine. (He was great at writing begging letters, as he always admitted himself.)

I immediately started writing poetry on it. I'd written poetry before, but I started seriously writing poetry when I first had access to a computer. That's not very romantic, I know.

And I can remember my first poem. It was titled "October", so I presume we got the computer in October. Here it is:

October's chilly evenings die a painful death
Succumbing slowly to the freezing tide of night.
Gone are all the sated skies of summer now.

I've always thought this was a very good first effort. Presumably I intended to write more than three lines, but gave up on it. I think it works well as a fragment. I'm proud of "sated skies".

It came to my mind as I was looking at the sky tonight.

If I knew how much grief came along with writing poetry, and caring about it, would I have started? Probably. But with more grim resolution.