The act of writing a poem freezes time

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 The act of writing a poem stills time—freezing the action, emotion, meaning of a moment.

Yet, the other day when I read the poem “Will You?” by Carrie Fountain, where she describes making valentines with her young children, I cried. I tried to remember making valentines with my own children—the pink and red construction paper, white doilies, stickers and glitter. I have a few of their valentines tucked in a box in my basement. Proof that we did this: that we cut out hearts and glued them. The doilies now yellowed; the glitter dulled. In some, my handwriting declares “Happy Valentine’s Day” and “Will You Be Mine?” above their squiggly signatures. I try to conjure the scene, the kitchen table (what house was that?), what age were my children? Maybe there’s a photo somewhere of us. But there’s not a poem.

I didn’t kiss my children goodnight and stay up to write that scene, to describe the smell of the glue, my daughter pressing stickers on her face, the earnestness of my oldest son working his fingers stubbornly to cut out a heart, the baby covered in glitter. Or to capture how I felt in that moment—making valentines, little declarations of affection, with my children—to write my love for them. That would have been a valentine to my future self.

The act of writing a poem stills time—freezing the action, emotion, meaning of a moment. Carrie Fountain wrote a beautiful poem, but it’s also the story of one February evening with her children who “are so young they cannot imagine a world/like the one they live in.” In the poem, she preserves a slice of their childhood, even as the poet is already looking ahead “I know they will someday soon/see everything and they will know about/everything and they will no longer take/never mind for an answer.” That time has no doubt already arrived for the poet and her children.

Witnessing even the dull dailiness of our lives through writing also leads to the kind of discovery Ada Limón, our recent U.S. Poet Laureate, describes in her poem “Not the Saddest Thing in the World.” On an ordinary day, she finds a dead bird and buries it, and goes “about [her] day” realizing that the ordinary has been transformed, that “Now something’s/breaking always on the skyline…” Limón’s poem urges us to lift our eyes, to see and record even the smallest events, for they each have significance.