When I Wrote A Poem a Day Before

This was the last poem in that series.
I see that I had trouble then, also, coming up with a poem every day.  It is not that, however--it isn't "coming up" with a poem. The poems are there.  We just have to give them their time, and we often just won't do that.

As this poem told us what we had learned by the exercise:

This is no more a poem a day
Than it is a poem a week.
Fewer poems than ideas for them:
Less time granted to the ideas;
More of both than solitude
In which to think and write them.
Poems hover around the corners of our minds
Trying to get in, to get to light.
They are the things that want the hard edges
Of reality, that want to come alive.
Oh, how we fight their strong desire;
We snooze, we read, procrastinate,
Clean sinks, pull weeds, clip flowers,
Stand at the open window and look out at nothing,
Fighting back the poems just crowding to be born,
The poems, which really ask for nothing more
Than word-cloaks, tatty clothing, less by far
Than the magnificent garments which they should have worn.

Do you see that subtle little rhyme that sneaks in there at the last? That's a conceit.  It springs from the days when I used to try to write sonnets. I love sonnets and liked the discipline required but that form seems to have left me for a kind of jeremiah-crying-in-the-wilderness kind of formlessness. Oh well.  I shouldn't try to explain it.

Tomorrow I will come up with a new poem.  It will be crass compared to the one above, but that is the way we must start when we have ignored that voice; it is a bit sulky and must be coddled awake by gentle daily prodding until the poet becomes herself a poem. YAZZYBEL