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Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem.-Edgar Allan Poe

Poetry is when emotion has found its thought and thought has found words--Robert Frost

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance--Carl Sandburg

I have nothing to say, I am saying it, and that is poetry--John Cage

You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you--Joseph Joubert

Poetry is what in a poem makes you laugh, cry, prickle, be silent, makes your toe nails twinkle, makes you want to do this or that or nothing, makes you know that you are alone in the unknown world, that your bliss and suffering is forever shared and forever all your own. ~Dylan Thomas

joybragi84

New Poem About Inspiration Or the Lack of It


Luna and I went walking yesterday morning (Friday) at the Fulton County Fairgrounds/Shooting Range, and we walked down the new road connecting to 62/412. Anyway, it was a sunny morning, hot and humid, but down in the valley where the creek runs into the City Park Pond, a heavy fog obscured everything beyond the pond. This creek here is not especially pretty. It is usually muddy and full of moss, but it looked cool in the fog.

Enough about the picture--the poem that I have for you today is revised from an idea that I had written up in 2005. I had long thought of rewriting the poem, but it merely seemed like a "whiner," so I never did. This revision hardly resembles the other.

Anyhow, I, and most poets I suppose, complain quite often about the lack of inspiration. We do it a lot because it is such a frustrating feeling to what to do something, to want to get some good words, lines, and verses down on paper. I mean every poet and artist knows what she or he wants to do-create that sucker! But what is it? How do you get IT in your mind. Well, most of us poets simply personify our brain's creative urges and make them human-like. That way, when we struggle to come up with ideas, we can blame somebody else. This poem examines whether that "blame-game" is really something that is wise to play. Enjoy!

Waiting for the Muse


Because she’s not with me, I wait,

Veiling fogs adrift in my mind.

She knows the needs I contemplate,

And so her absence here is most unkind.


Did I speak that note? Did she hear

The flat impatience of the word?

She has not answered yet. I fear

She means to keep my petty rhymes obscured?


Maybe, my verse has offended

Or stupidly shot off the mark?

Maybe our poems have ended?

Who knows clear truth here in this inky dark?


I suppose maybe she hates

How I endlessly test her love,

When she’s been forced by binding Fates

To lend my stone-like brain an uphill shove.


Sisyphus! Sisyphus!

You cannot be my muse!


I lost her interest in my world?

Oh, my! What’s that I might have done?

My entire essence around her curled

Like a transient rainbow wraps around the sun.


To miss the beat! To miss the beat!

To smell ambrosial food and not to eat!


Oh! I only wish that it was easy

To believe all this time she’s been busy.


Let’s not say that!

Who else does she inspire?

I am her favorite

Poet, of whom, she’ll never tire.


I assume she has no other, yet her

Attitude suggests that I’ve upset her

And so she’s gone off to find a better

Poet. --Nah! But…

Rather than wait for her, I’ll go get her.

Comments


I find that I cannot exist without Poetry--without eternal poetry--half the day will not do--the whole of it--I began with a little, but habit has made me a Leviathan.-John Keats

We do not quite say that the new is more valuable because it fits in; but its fitting in is a test of its value.-T. S. Eliot

A man may praise and praise, but no one recollects but that which pleases.-George Gordon, Lord Byron

The great beauty of poetry is that it makes everything in every place interesting.-John Keats

Our faulty elder poets sacrificed the passion and passionate flow of poetry to the subtleties of intellect and to the stars of wit; the moderns to the glare and glitter of a perpetual, yet broken and heterogeneous imagery, or rather to an amphibious something, made up, half of image, and half of abstract meaning. The one sacrificed the heart to the head; the other both heart and head to point and drapery.-S. T. Coleridge

The purpose of rhythm, it has always seemed to me, is to prolong the moment of contemplation, the moment when we are both asleep and awake, which is the one moment of creation.-W. B. Yeats

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