Feeding the Ducks

I was writing long before I can recall scrawling words with ink. Not on paper but in oral fashion like my ancestors from long ago. I would tell elaborate stories, usually through song, to the trees in our yard or the animals at the barn. As a child, my life was a constant narrated musical of what I was doing, what I wanted, and how I was feeling. So, naturally, the first piece of writing I can remember putting to paper was an echo of a song; a poem.

I could not tell you if I was in first grade yet, but I can confirm my spelling was almost indecipherable. Being limited in what I could spell, I was forced to pick words for the poem that I could write. I remember feeling confined and frustrated by it. Which, being dyslexic, it's a feeling I have never entirely lost. But, at the end of writing out the poem and practicing it aloud several times, I felt pleased enough to run through the house sharing it with my father and mother while acting it out.

It is the simplest poem I have written, yet it was the start of an eternal addiction. I had just been allowed to pick out my first diary; a diary that I would mostly stuff with drawings and a few sentences about my mood or my pet's names. But, the first thing I added to its pages was a poem about ducks.

I am a duck,

Quack, quack, quack,

I shake my butt,

Waddle, waddle, waddle,

I am a duck,

Quack, quack, quack.

Watch me strut,

Waddle, waddle, waddle,

I am a duck,

Quack, quack, quack.

Those small words, accompanied by a crude drawing of the mentioned waterfowl, were the start to my writing. Throughout my childhood and even now, those ducks would reappear in my writing.

As I became more skilled and adept at figuring out how to spell what I wanted to say, my poetry shifted from small things like flowers and the earth to entire stories about imagined characters and villain's. My poems had beginnings, middles, and ends like every book I had read. Yet, they only spanned a breath of a few pages. Often they were centered around a character other than myself. I wrote about murders, tales of revenge, goblins, werewolves, and other fantastical things.

In my later teens, my poems all shifted to reflections on abuse, depression, and feeling trapped. The poems from that part of my life are some of my favorite but perhaps my bleakest work. Most were written as metaphors, a whole collection of which revolved around a puppet trying to figure out its purpose in the world. Many ended in death or suicide, which I am grateful to say was not my end.

During college my poems became punuated by happy and positive chirpings of hope and enjoyment. Many examined my estranged relationship with my father, which I still find myself writing about. And now, well after graduating, my poems are a mix of all past subjects and styles. Newly added to the bandwidth are romantic poems fueled by my marriage. Which, mind you, is something I never fancied myself to be a writer of. Childhood Laura always detested sappy things. Alas, my life is one big bottle of sap, and I love it.

And those ducks, they always come back no matter how much my style or subject matter changes. They have spanned my work since that first fateful encounter. You can even find them in recent work on my vocal page. Truly, it was not something I thought about until reading Please Tell Me Why by Adam Patrick: https://vocal.media/writers/please-tell-me-why .

It stirred in me thoughts of my first poem and how my poetry has evolved after it. During my reflection, I noticed how my usage of ducks has changed. Ducks are no longer the happy, quirky expression of joy they were on that first day. No, ducks are now placed in my work in moments of death or sorrow. They are present while a character is reflecting upon their recent actions or debating the best outcome to a problem. My ducks serve as a happy blot of calm amidst the chaos. They are meant to echo what the character does not have or ground them to something gentle and soothing.

My ducks symbolize the past and all sweet things that are lost to the cruelty of the world. And, perhaps they are in my writing as an unconscious manifestation of how my writing has shifted. They linger as a token of reflection to me for when my writing was innocent fables unmarred by the abuse of my teen years. As I quietly reflect here, they sit amidst my poems echoing the changes in my form, speaking back to when it started. Back to a very simple, quack, quack. And maybe they will eventually swim their way into one of the sappy poems I keep writing. Who knows? There are many years left, and I am sure my writing will evolve some more.