I can’t say this often enough: Write what you know. One thing that I know very well and have written about often is my little brother. He’s bigger than I am now, but it wasn’t always that way.
Until my brother was born, I was the only kid in the house, so of course I was considered special! That’s right, I was wonderful. I was amazing. I was incredible. I was sensational. I was a genius! It didn’t matter what I did, my mother would still brag about me. “Oh, look, my son the genius is sleeping with his face in the oatmeal again.”
That all changed when I was not quite five years old, and my mother brought home a weird-looking little package from the hospital—my baby brother. I hated him! I hated him because all of a sudden my parents seemed to forget all about me, and I wasn’t so special anymore. Now, to be fair, I have to admit that my mother tried to make me feel better about him at first. She handed him to me, all wrapped up snugly in a blue blanket. With a big smile and looking more enthusiastic than I’d ever seen her before, she said, “Son, this is yours!” I guess she supposed I’d like him better if I thought that he was a present for me.
I took a good look at him. What an ugly little critter! He had a tiny, wrinkled face and more or less resembled a cross between a prune and a peeled armadillo. I couldn’t believe that I was related to this creature. I wrinkled up my own face, shook my head, and said to my mother, “This—this thing is mine? I don’t think so. Uh-uh. No way,” and I handed him right back.
As he grew older, I got to like him more, but at first I didn’t find him all that interesting. After all, he didn’t do much of anything. Mostly he slept, and when he wasn’t sleeping, he cried, and when he wasn’t crying, he wiggled around a bit. His major occupations seemed to be peeing and pooping in his diaper. He was a smelly little guy.
Over the years I’ve written many poems about my brother or based on him. Here’s a poem about my brother when he was just a week old. The poem is very simple and says in very few words what he was like when I was not quite five years old and saw him for the first time.
My Baby Brother
My baby brother is so small,
he hasn’t even learned to crawl.
He’s only been around a week,
and all he seems to do is bawl
and wiggle, sleep…and leak.