I am a perpetual baby spider, blown everywhere by the wind.
But I want to be a weed, impossible to uproot.
I want to crack sidewalks with my stubborn roots and leaves and stalks.
I will reappear after every application of poison, every time I am ripped up, impervious to every will but my own.
I am a baby spider. But I want to be a weed.
ABOUT THE POEM BELOW THE CUT.
I once had an internship in a group home in Sweden, and my mentor there was an older woman named Synnove. I adored her. She seemed to adore me, too.
Although she was probably 40 years older than me, she confessed she thought I was wise and wondered how I got that way. I can’t say I agree with her, that I am wise. But I have been told that sort of thing for most of my life, that I was mature for my age or what have you. Most people just wanted you to laugh about it and thank them, but Synnove and I were genuine with one another, so I decided to give her a genuine answer. I thought about it a moment in order to translate the words in my head into Swedish, and then told her being an older child might do that to you. Trauma and suffering, too.
She wanted to know what I meant, and I told her that growing up I didn’t really come from anywhere. I moved thirteen times in as many years. She asked me: “But where do you feel you are from? Where are your roots?” I told her I do not have any. I am like a baby spider. I have been moved wherever the wind willed me, never there long enough to lay down any roots. It made her cry.
Sometimes, it still makes me cry, too. I wouldn’t say this has shaped me into an unhappy person, because now I find comfort in solitude and in my independence. But for many years of my life I was unhappy because I never felt there was a place I could call home, a place where I belonged. I am ever reluctant to reach out to others and make friends, to lay down any roots. Though I no longer am moved wherever it is my parents go, I have a restlessness now in my bones, and the uncertainty of life, housing, the economy... it means that where I am now is not really solid ground for me, either, and I am not immune to the occasional bitter wonderings of what may have been if we had stayed in one place.
This is only the background for the poem, but not what sparked its creation. For me, poems have always been something pulled fully-formed from the ether while I’m doing anything but thinking of poetry. Usually only a word or two needs to be swapped out before it’s done, and they are always short as a byproduct of their method of creation.
This poem came to me while I was in the home stretch of my usual morning walk, listening to Michelle Obama narrate her book Becoming. She had the exact opposite kind of childhood, grew up living in the same house. But in hearing her talk about her life, I find some similarities between us, as I think is part of the point of her story. It was in feeling these similarities that the poem came to life.
