How hard can it actually be to write a poem? Let's find out. |
Writing poetry's hard stuff, but not writing it can sometimes be even harder. The words spill forth like a burst dam, and nothing can stop it, no mop big enough. The best you can do is sop it up with gray rags and a rusty tin pail from the cracks in the concrete on the front walk, but to little avail. Don't use your Mom's best towels, however, or she might write a few poems of her own. If the sun is shining, some will evaporate and you can find them later in the wriggling tails of the polliwogs in the murky pond, prismatic rainbows created by the ripples they fashion from the marriage of algae and sunlight. You can find poetry in the condensation on the bottom of a mottled leave, in the ragged cotton tatters of clouds raked across the azure sky by the branches of very tall trees, in the verdant green of a caterpillar's polka-dotted overcoat, big black eyes and a yellow flannel vest, munching his lunch complacently, and sometimes you can find it even tracked inside on the gray velvet paws of the cat who now lies snoozing the daylight away on your unmade bed. To avoid such messes in the future, set a poetry trap. Beside your bed, open a clean composition book and a wooded no. 2 pencil. Each morning slam the book tight to keep the poetry from enameling your daytime, for truly poetry belongs to the night, black words like black bats, have sonar and can easily navigate your dreams, until it seems that poetry is your native language, the only one you ever really spoke with any ease at all. Sometimes it seems that poetry and dreams are identical twins. One seldom exists without the other. Dreams, the Vehicle and Poetry, the Interpreter. Without Dreams, Poetry would have no means of transportation, and nowhere to go at all. |