Last weekend we drove to the Type Rider II: The Tandem Poetry Tour kick off in Boulder. It was amazing to see Maya Stein and Amy Tingle again after meeting them at Patti Digh’s Design Your Life Camp last year. The Type Rider promise is: Give us one word, we will give you two poems. They sit at their colorful, mechanical typewriters and tap out poems, right there, in the sun or the wind, the heat or the cold. While you stare at them. Not sure any words would come if people started at me trying to write.
We got little treasures including a deck of pocket poetry which now resides in my purse, a silver bicycle necklace, awesome red Type Rider II shirts and these…. two poems written my the tandem poets for my own precious Samantha Rae of Sunshine. She’s struggling right now; life isn’t easy when you are finally grown up – surprise, surprise! As always with good poems the words seemed to find their way to that place she is in right now. Enjoy!
Sunshine
It’s not up there, splashing out in all that blue.
Well, it is there, but if that’s the only place you look,
You’ve got it all wrong.
Bend down.
Lean close.
Listen.
Feel the tiny hairs of your arms,
The little whips of surprise
Your breath makes when you realize this moment,
This moment,
THIS is what matters,
What makes everything mean something,
And light up,
And live to the fullest of itself.
This.
You,
-Maya Stein
Sunshine
I’m going to have to write about Little Miss Sunshine
because that kid (and believe me I know she’s not real she’s a character in a movie)
that kid h ad what it takes.
She had moxy, she had heart
she had the will it takes to go for her dream
and not let a single thing stand in her way.
That’s the way to live, I’m telling you right here
In this parking lot where you stand in front of us
in the sunshine,
Put one foot in front of the other and live out loud.
-Amy Tingle
Autumn Journal 