Poetry After Poetry

You will love again the stranger who was yourself.
Derek Walcott


You dip the pen
in your own blood and wrench the words
from your most caustic pain,
and write. Write the horror that is life
refracted by your eyes upon the page.

You have forgotten
what it is to be silent, to hold your selfhood
as a sacred thing free
from this sacrifice of your vision for art
at the expense of privacy.

Permit yourself to pause.
Staunch the flow of this red ink at fingertips.
Fold away the parchment
you have flayed from your thinnest skin
and rest in your own most quiet reflection.



I am still playing Play It Again! with Old Toads. This poem arises from Kim Nelson's Sunday Mini Challenge, Love After Love, and owes its imagery to Mama Zen's Blood of a Poet, although I did not manage to complete it in 80 words.

Poetry as Remedy

the poet like an acrobat
                                 climbs on rime
                                          to a high wire of his own making
Lawrence Ferlighetti




I might compare him
                        to a freedom-fighter
                                                or terrorist
words strapped to his chest
                           in place of bombs
finger on the trigger of his pen
                                       ready to spill ink

Or to something sweeter
                                   and more simple
                                                  a queen bee
laying her poems like larvae
                                        nurtured on nectar
                                              in the heart of a hive

But I believe poets are the remedy
                          for the hidden plague
                                              of verbal degradation
panacea for the blighted art
                    when functional illiteracy
                                                   rules the world


Day 16 ~ COMPARE

Anmol is our host of the Tuesday Platform in The Imaginary Garden today, inviting us to honour the centenary of Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

Intrusion

‘it is human nature to stand in the middle of a thing 
but you cannot stand in the middle of this’
Marianne Moore



Only a dream
          the pressure of a hand
          placed on the back of my hand
in the dark as I reach for a notebook

on a table top, I tell my sleeping self.
          Do not be at all perturbed
          by the distinctly warm flesh
or sound of breathing quite close to

your ear; shall I argue with my dream
          voice? Or allow the scene to unfold
          with the intruder taking me
by the throat or into his arms?

Reality is as it is
          perceived; rightly or wrongly,
          it is all the same, yet I reassure
myself in dreams most kindly, and sleep on.


Day 9 ~ FLESH

Sanaa is our host in The Imaginary Garden, with Understand That This is a Dream.

Reliquary

I do these 
Things which I do, which please 
         No one but myself. 
Marianne Moore



To contemplate innate fear
is to take a view of one’s own infancy
as something of a relic, albeit statuesque,
and break it down to nothing
more than this:
I feared emptiness. Once.
My dreams disturbed me, because in them
I became someone else
whose thoughts were terror to me;
this excavation, however, is redundant.
Now I am the architect of my own silence
building monuments to solitude with my bare hands
and a nightmare is mere fodder for poetry.
To be lost, is freedom new-found.


Day 8 ~ MONUMENTS

Rommy is our host in The Imaginary Garden, asking us to face our Childhood Fears.