I will use this blog to post new poems and to invite discussion of particular topics. We’ll see if that flies or not. No harm in trying I guess. If you want to respond, please do, otherwise this is going to get mighty lonely. I’ll also post old poems by others that are no longer under copyright. To kick this off, I was intitially tempted to go right for a really big topic ( I won’t tell you yet what it is) but I thought I better start with something a little easier to get things rolling. Maybe not a whole lot less, but here it is.
How important is inspiration, the muse, duende in writing? How important is it to just sit down and write, whether you feel inspired or not? What do you do?
The Ones Who Get the World Ready
2AM. A light wind stirs the dry
leaves of the ash outside your window.
Soon, the cold November rains will come and strip
the branches bare. A blank pad of paper sits on the desk and you twirl
a pen in your right hand – thumb, index, middle.
Thumb, index, middle. Over and over.
You hear the stair risers creak and the dog
comes in, settles at your side.
You stare at the window and your own face
stares back, with nothing to say.
Don’t think this is a poem about searching
for inspiration. It’s just man who can’t sleep
and doesn’t want to bother his wife
with his restlessness. He thinks he’s a poet so instead
of boiling a chicken and chopping vegetables,
or cleaning the garage, he pretends to write.
In the distance he hears the low thrum of diesels, the long
whistle as a Burlington Northern & Santa Fe freight
crosses Pine St., the diesel sound slowly fading until
there is only, again, the rustling of dry leaves. This is the hour
when the world comes unmoored from its foundations and begins to drift.
Here and there throughout the town a few
men and woman wake, the ones who make the world
solid and familiar for the rest of us. Trash haulers and policemen,
paper carriers, nurses, truck drivers, bakers. Resolute, even brave,
with a dogged, determinedly unreflective bravery, they grope
with blind hands in the dark, clutching at the anchors
that will secure us all for one more day to our common lives.
Michael Adams copyright 2012