The Dove

There once was a man of great silence
Inside he held lots of violence
But he was a dove
and expressed it with love
so everyone called him 'your highness'

I wrote this poem in the fourth grade. My class spent most of that year in a temporary building next to the playground and I and can remember handwriting the words while gazing out the window at the monkey bars. It was a weird period in my life. I had this mink tail (so soft) I had bought at a trading post on summer vacation that I carried around with me everywhere. I lost the furry scrap around the same time I wrote this poem, and I remember feeling frantic about it. I definitely combed every inch of the classroom and playground looking for it, and even had the teacher ask the class if anyone had seen it. I never found my furry friend, but my dad took me to a pelt shoppe downtown to get a replacement — a much softer and prettier white one. My dad also submitted my poem to the local daily (the Denver Post) and they published it on their Kidz Korner page. I remember being really excited but also afraid that the toughs at school would read it and find another reason to push me around — the mink tail hanging out of my pocket did me no favors.

As a freshman in high school, I resubmitted the piece to a poetry contest announced in the classified section of Rolling Stone. I think I was too lazy to write something new, and figured that “The Dove” had already been picked up by a major city newspaper. I got a letter in the mail a month or so later informing me that I was a semi-finalist and that I was invited to Washington DC for the unveiling of the book that my work was to be a part of: A Question of Balance. Joan Rivers was scheduled to be the celebrity emcee and my name, along with the names of the other semi-finalists, was going to be projected onto the National Mall as part of a grand laser show — I wish I was making this up. My dad broke it to me gently that the whole thing was a setup to get me to purchase multiple copies of the book, priced at $200. Anyway, the poem, while even dorkier than I remember, has a rather beguiling AABBA rhyme scheme that I would never attempt today.