The Difficulty of Finding...

I have been struggling to write for too many months now. I can just about manage a few sentences, a list of observations, the odd scribble about last night's dream, but the voice of poetry evades me.

I did find it for a moment - the early hours of Saturday morning brought poetic chorus through the darkness, as if morning was finally going to dawn. I wrote the first nine words of a line and they felt like poetry, tasted like poetry. Those nine words - which seemed to be just the right words, in the right order - were like a fix. My boyfriend watched as my eyes lit and my fingers tapped out rhythm on the air. My lips made the shapes of those nine words over and over again, producing a whisper to coax my ear and mind into uncovering another line.

On parts of the track the rain has gathered,

clear and still in mud hollows

clear and still and deep in the mud dirt.

Lakes that give the forest to us again

again. As if a dream, we are giants

as if it were a dream and we were giants

able to pick hundred year old

able to pluck ancient oaks firs from the water like reeds.

Eventually all gained momentum ceased as the stanza found its end. It had ended where I hadn't anticipated or expected. This stanza, which had been thought of as an opening, now felt more like a dead-end, like I had written myself into a corner and couldn't quite figure out how to write myself back out.

I left the poetry puzzle attached to the pad. Occasionally, throughout Saturday afternoon, I glanced at the words to check if I still liked them.

As night approached, my cat came fumbling in from the window, patrolled the perimeter of the lounge before circling inwards and stepping his damp paws across the laptop and then the paper pad.            I liked the way he caused a few of the words to have inky atmospheres - as if each were a solitary planet within a universe I still fail to truly comprehend.

*          *          *

There is a turbulence between mind and creativity. At some point the poetry puzzle was torn from the pad, squeezed between clenched hands until it was compact and circular.

I thought it had been taken by the bin men.          But it hadn't.

This morning when I found the yellow paper orb tucked behind a bookend it made me think how love will always try its hardest to preserve. I wondered how much else might have been saved if love had been there longer - imagined a mountain built from thrown away paper.

Over time, something begins to accumulate - like mercury within the bodies of hat makers - and the challenge is in remembering

                                                                       who

                                                                              am

                                                                                     I

Thank you for reading,

Lara