Halber Junge (Half Boy)

A Poem for NaPoWriMo Day 2

Day two. The road continues.

The rules, painted rainbow. The fence, still there. — South Africa, 2016. Image: Connie Vöge-Auer

Many poetry prompts circulate on Substack these day. I join the ones that speak to me immediately. Yesterday I stumbled into Alex Dawson and her offerings; today she asks us to write an “an unconventional “To do list” poem”. I did that too, you’ll find it below my contribution for the official NaPoWriMo prompt, which asks us to return to our childhood.

Speaking of things that are unsettling, it’s now time for our daily prompt — optional, as always! In her poem, “Pittsylvania County,” Ellen Bryant Voigt recounts watching her father and brother play catch with sensory detail and a strangely foreboding sense of inevitability. The speaker watches the scene, but is outside of it – cut off. She’s not so much jealous of the interaction between her father and brother, as filled with a pervading sense that she wants something more or different from life than what the moment seems to presage. Today, we’d like to challenge you to write your own poem in which you recount a childhood memory. Try to incorporate a sense of how that experience indicated to you, even then, something about the person you’d grow up to be.

Four years old. Two games. Neither one mine.

Halber Junge

At three I already knew the word no
aimed at me like a correction —
my whole body already turning
toward dark, toward rough, toward real.

They called me Halber Junge.
Half a boy.
As if I were a fraction
of something
rather than the whole
of something else entirely.

I stood on the playground
and watched two games run at once —
both games left a gap
the exact shape of me.

Maybe it was. Maybe they felt the current
I felt,
the one that said:
fit, shrink, mirror, comply,
you are a member here,
membership carries conditions.

I felt it. I stood in it
the way you stand in a river
and feel the pull
and plant your feet anyway.

I still searched for
what I was planting them toward.
Only that Halber Junge
already sounded more like me
than anything the room expected,

that the child left outside both circles
already knew
what the adult
would spend decades
learning to say out loud:

I am whole.
The gap you see
is your measuring.

Now your turn.

What childhood memory already carried the shape of who you’d become? What did your body know before your words caught up?

Share your poem — or even just the memory — in the comments. Every form welcome. Every language welcome. Every length welcome.

We write to find out what we already knew.

And this is my unusual To Do List.

The April 1st prompt by Alex Dawson was: Write a poem about someone who played the fool; either yourself or someone else in honour of April Fool’s Day

I contributed:

What do you you think? What would be your unusual To Do List? Let me know in the comments.

Thank you so much for reading.

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