I just found out that April is National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo for short) — an annual project encouraging poets to write one poem each day in April. What a cool idea, and why not give a try? Here’s a link to the NaPoWriMo web site for more info. If you’re inspired to join the project or are already part of it, please leave me a comment so I can follow your work! Here’s my 4/1 poem:
there’s an ancient tiny place
there’s an ancient tiny place in the core of my heart where the wind whistles low and hollow are the walls and the doorways
there’s an echo swirling round but you cannot make it out for its from another time and something melancholy flies beneath its shadow
I didn’t used to know all this pain was waiting here for I’d mastered how to live and I’d learned a thousand ways to do the numbing
I didn’t used to know of the emptiness behind all the patching and the pruning and the silencing and smoothing and the running
when I slow it all down and stand and meet what’s there the terror is just this: it will engulf, control, abuse obscure, delete, kill survive and then forget me
but I sit anyway — for there’s nothing left to do — waiting for the stars to fall and all the worlds to end and I watch and I listen to my heart
a little while goes and on the very other side I can feel more than see an old sun shining bright and something softens like a sigh and for a time then I can hear the choir singing
like I never did before both the awakened and forlorn hurling souls against the sky that must gather all their voices and shelter their illusions in its bosom
so brazen with their screams and so trusting with their keening how I long to open wide set my sorrow free to fly and join their story
and then it’s there, exploding out crashing round, smashing open all the dead and dying walls and the locks left over from the brutal sad and barren hiding times
and when the rising chorus kisses on the cheek the olden sun and melts back to my gaping heart without a toll without a threat without a sound I’ll be forgiven