The 10th Brick From the Bottom
Home is a brick-red structure
With a black entrance and exit.
A blackness that’s noted on the first
And last day of the month
And all those in between.
By which, I mean,
If leaving or entering
There’s no way around it.
With equal regularity
I have ignored the tenth
Brick from the bottom.
Though both door and brick
share the same seniority.
These musings are a preamble
To the following query:
Which word or words go unheeded
By each of us daily?
Then one day,
Out-of-the-blue, it is needed.
In a leisurely way we
Fish around becoming increasingly
Frantic when we fail to hoist
It from a memory
Turned murky and dense.
Our heartbeat increases
We become tense, unused
As we are, to grasping for
Words like a stranger, confused.
That happened for me
Yesterday when I noticed my
Whatchamacallit was showing.
For all my efforts, I could not
Call it to mind.
Some 10 hours later, as
I was getting ready to unwind
It flitted into my active
Memory bank - “strap”
Was the word I had been
Unable to find. My bra-strap
Had slipped from under
My shoulder pad.
The trauma of handling something
Whose nomenclature I could
Not remember
Prompts me to pay attention,
Hereinafter, to the banal little words we banish
And only call them into service
When at our most selfish.
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Submitted by Belleta on January 18, 2021
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 1:08 min read
- 4 Views
Quick analysis:
Scheme | ABXXCCDB EXXXE XEXEXX EEXEX XFXF EXDXG XGXHXHAX DXAXIXI |
---|---|
Closest metre | Iambic trimeter |
Characters | 1,223 |
Words | 227 |
Stanzas | 8 |
Stanza Lengths | 8, 5, 6, 5, 4, 5, 8, 7 |
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"The 10th Brick From the Bottom" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 1 Jun 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem/60584/the-10th-brick-from-the-bottom>.
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