Poems inspired by Collins

In a New Post on your blog, please share a new poem of at least 10 lines inspired by Billy Collins' "On Turning Ten" or "Evasive Maneuvers."  Include an image.  

Please be sure you have caught up on any missing work by this Friday.  I have to post grades with the office first thing Monday morning.  

You may also begin working on your children's book project.

 Evasive Maneuvers

I grew up hiding from the other children

I would break off from the pack

on its patrol of the streets every Saturday

and end up alone behind a hedge

or down a dim hallway in a strange basement.

No one ever came looking for me,

which only added to the excitement.

I used to hide from adults, too,

mostly behind my mother’s long coat

or her floral dress depending on the season.

I tried to learn how to walk

between my father’s steps while he walked

like the trick poodle I had seen on television.

And I hid behind books,

usually one of the volumes of the encyclopedia

that was kept behind glass in a bookcase,

the letters of the alphabet in gold.

Before I knew how to read,

I sat in an armchair in the living room

and turned the pages, without a clue

about the worlds that were pressed

between D and F, M and O, W and Z.

Maybe this explains why

I looked out the bedroom window

first thing this morning

at the heavy trees, low gray clouds,

and said the world gastropod out loud,

and having no idea what it meant

went downstairs and looked it up

then hid in the woods from my wife and our dog.

–Billy Collins, Ballistics:  Poems 

On Turning Ten 

The whole idea of it makes me feel
like I'm coming down with something,
something worse than any stomach ache
or the headaches I get from reading in bad light-
a kind of measles of the spirit,
a mumps of the psyche,
a disfiguring chicken pox of the soul.

You tell me it is too early to be looking back,
but that it is because you have forgotten
the perfect simplicity of being one
and the beautiful complexity introduced by two.
But I can lie on my bed and remember every digit.
At four I was an Arabian wizard.
I could make myself invisible
by drinking a glass of milk a certain way.
At seven I was a soldier, at nine a prince.

But now I am mostly at the window
watching the late afternoon light.
Back then it never fell so solemnly
against the side of my tree house,
and my bicycle never leaned against the garage
as it does today,
all the dark blue speed drained out of it.

This is the beginning of sadness, I say to myself,
as I walk thought the universe in my sneakers.
It is time to say good-bye to my imaginary friends,
time to turn the first big number.

It seems only yesterday I used to believe
there was nothing under my skin but light.
If you cut me I would shine.
But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life,
I skin my knees. I bleed.


From THE ART OF DROWNING (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995)