Look It, A Fragment

Vaughn composed her first poem last fall. She was a few months shy of her second birthday, and KC was at work. Vaughn was doing well speaking-wise, already stringing sentences together with relative ease, so I figured why not ask her if she wanted to write a poem. Excited, she said yes and grabbed my pen. I found another pen as she spoke the first line or two. But no sooner had I jotted down the lines in her oversized art pad, her mind was onto something else: setting up a party for her stuffed animals. I decided I would keep writing down whatever she said. After a few lines, she became curious, came over and looked down at what I was writing. The poetry idea was on again. She spoke a few, unprompted lines about the moon and Sharma (our cat). Then she went back to her stuffed-animal party. I continued writing down whatever she said; soon she returned again to see what I was doing. She swayed herself around a bit, then declaimed a few, final lines. I titled the poem "Look It," since those words (obviously they "should be" "Look At") started three lines, including the last two. When KC got home from work later that afternoon, it was a great surprise. Not just the project itself, but also the flow, the rhythm, and the interesting way it captured Vaughn's stream of consciousness. We talked about how we had to type up the poem. We talked about it again later in the week. And later in the month. And then the next month. Unfortunately we never did type it up, and of course the art pad became pretty mangled as fall turned to winter turned to spring. Eventually it was tossed. Now what's funny is how we sometimes will struggle to remember a phrase or an image—grasping at fragments, then holding onto them, repeating them slowly as if to get some sense of the forgotten work to which they once belonged. It's not unlike reading fragments of Anacreon or Sappho. "Look it my pen everybody. / Look it my pen."