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.

One Tree

Today, the first and last of every Tree 
Speaks to humankind. Come to me, here beside the River.
Maya Angelou

Bonsai Soul, Set Free
@skyloverpoetry

Yes, somehow within me, I am as a tree –
though fixed in time and space, cradled
close to the earth by night, my roots reach
deep, spread wide to touch yours in dreams.

By daylight, I grow into the space we call sky,
where the breeze of your thoughts teases
the topmost branches of my mind and speaks
in the notes of birds, nesting in my hair –

In truth, we are all one. One earth. One sky.
Each leaf is part of the whole. Each flower
calls to the bee. We are neither more nor less
than atoms of universal connectivity. One tree.



Play It Again! With Old Toads offers several inspiring prompts from The Imaginary Garden's archives. This poem is based on Mary's Mixed Bag ~ Connection with a some channeling of Hannah's Transforming Nature prompt about totems, whereby I thought of the tree itself from which totems are carved.
I was also greatly inspired this week, by Maya Angelou's reading of On the Pulse of Morning.