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Daisy is a poet
Daisy is a poet
She likes to wear shirts that are too big for her
And she likes to dance around her kitchen when the Arctic Monkeys come on the radio
She likes to write poems about girls with sad eyes and boys who love them
And she likes to put off her homework to do so
Daisy is a dreamer
She can spend hours in a car just watching the trees go by and thinking about living in a log cabin and going on picnics and feeding ducks at the pond
She likes to sit under the maple tree and watch her leaves turn to fire and drop to the ground
And she only likes to use her pencil to write a verse about how deep the sky can look on an autumn afternoon
Daisy is an idiot
She should spend more time in school, more time at home practicing her times tables
Her mother would rather die than know that her daughter’s grades are closer to the end of the alphabet than the beginning
She should read a textbook because God knows the plot of To Kill a Mockingbird won’t get her a job
She should use those pencils that she manages to wear down to the nub and write some college essays or apply for a job at the grocery store because she could probably use some discipline and a little extra cash
God knows that maple tree can’t be her entertainment forever
Daisy is a sinner
She hasn’t memorized a single verse of the Bible
Yet we know her brain functions, as she’s memorized seven verses of the song she wrote about her stupid, ugly tree in the backyard
She doesn’t even bother to wear a dress to church
I think I saw her chewing gum once
Daisy is a disrespectful little girl who could use a lesson on getting her priorities straight
Daisy is a poet
She likes to put on socks and slide around on the slippery linoleum floor of the kitchen
She likes to sing songs to her cats and have contests with herself about how high she can climb the maple tree
Daisy is a genius
She knows that she doesn’t need black check marks in her book to be special and smart
She knows that the amount of letters that come after her name one day, MS, PhD, will never matter as much as the amount of letters she writes to the boys she loves
She knows that memorizing a verse in Latin, or any other language, is not as important as knowing the language of the wind as it rustles through the trees
Daisy knows that life is more than a grade in a book
And that that blasted book will rot in a landfill when its time comes
Daisy is older than any of us
Daisy is fifteen years old
