Unexpected Intersections

I'm processing the events of the past few days in poetic fragments.  My husband and I witnessed the Chernobyl disaster from two different continents. Last night, I lay in bed on the same continent as Chernobyl, talking with my husband in the darkness when we couldn't sleep, having the conversations we waited to have until our daughter was in bed. And in the wee hours of this Poetry Friday, I got up with her, as I do every day. Our wonderful Poetry Friday host today is Tricia at The Miss Rumphious Effect . She shares the results of her poetry sisters challenge and has links to all of today's Poetry Friday poets  here . _______ note: Radioactive material was washed out of the sky when it rained. Children were told not to splash in puddles to avoid playing in concentrated contaminated water, and potentially getting it on their clothes.

In our family, we do a lot of thinking about thinking, because we are all neurodiverse (autism and ADHD). We're often engaged in discussions about how our neurodiversity influences the way we experience the world. From how we socialize to how we organize ourselves to complete tasks, our neurodiversity is a factor in everything we do and every experience we have. This week I decided to try to use poetry to express the experience of having ADHD. Although ADHD, like autism, can be characterized by the ability to hyperfocus on a topic or task for an extended period of time, the characteristic that is most commonly associated with ADHD is difficulty in sustaining attention .  In my attempt to express this latter aspect of the ADHD experience I ended up with two poems, both of which use the same metaphor. One is an almost-haiku (haiku-esque?) that's missing a syllable on the middle line, one is free verse. I'd love to know if you have a preference - let me know in the comments!...

 Welcome everyone to Poetry Friday! If you're new to Poetry Friday, you can read more about it here . I've been chasing deadlines all week, but poetry always provides a welcome pause in the busiest of schedules. Perhaps because of the kind of writing I've been doing (which is not related to poetry at all) it was a bit hard to get started on a poem this week. I looked at a few of the poetic forms I've bookmarked over the past months, but in the end, turned to one of my favorite forms, the acrostic .  Thanks for joining the Poetry Friday party today! Add your link to the party below. You are invited to the Inlinkz link party! Click here to enter