The Poets' Ache Redux...
Of what use is poetry?
Where does this drive to record the stream of words from the subconscious come from?
Is it seeping into our souls from the shared intelligence of the Universe?
The mystic whispers of Muses and Angels?
Transmissions across time and space from other dimensions?
I know beyond any doubt that we poets are connected by and in it,
This adoring of the written word,
The unstoppable drive to produce them.
A clue is how it screams to me in Autumn.
An ephemeral yet undeniable force,
A drumbeat of psychic power
It manifests in an acute sense of the passage of time,
An urgency to salvage traces of moments soon to be gone forever,
Otherwise lost and forgotten.
I know in my bones that every beautiful and unique Autumn leaf will end its dance,
Become dull and moldy,
Crumble into the Earth and feed insects and worms,
Forever gone and faded from eye and mind.
Every snowflake and frost crystal will melt away,
Blades of grass mowed and mulched.
We are all leaves and snow.
Once in a great while an Autumn leaf lands in amber.
I am writing this with a pen from the late 1990's,
Shocked that it still writes,
Caught in amber like a tiny miracle.
Perhaps we all hope to be so lucky as the leaf in amber,
Or as pyramids and sphinxes,
With enough mystery to be worthy of memory or at least investigation.
How many notebooks full of art and poetry lie in musty boxes,
Lost to attics and basements and old garages,
Or buried in landfills,
Perhaps sitting on a shelf in an abandoned gold mine,
In a dusty nightstand in a bedroom of a ghost town saloon,
And worse,
In abandoned poetry boards scattered in forgotten dark attics of the internet?
It would need an army of love to save them all.
I ache for our words to be blessed with Amber.
AquarianM
By: Daniel A. Stafford
© 10/08/2019
