My heart is inditing a good
matter…my tongue is the
pen of a ready writer.
(Psalm 45:1)
I
Poetic Labor
Sitting here waiting…
fogged brain—like an anxious
womb craving impregnation of
creativity—pleading the inner
genius thereof, to usher in the labor
that issues the birth of the long
awaited poem.
It’s soon painfully realized that poetry
is nature and nature is poetry—deciding
when and where the midwife of revelations
will be called to delivery.
The crisis of unawareness cured—awareness—
I now cheerfully labor in tender contemplation; the
Spirit of nature’s midwife soothing my suffering with
The coming joy of the birth of motherhood.
II
Poetic Incubation
Here wood-shedding in the cave,
my mind seems to have gone into
an eerie state of suspended animation;
leaving words sitting around and chatting
as if they were in an induced drunken stupor.
When aroused, they seem to rise up
and hop onto a lexical merry-go-round;
or just sit there screaming as if in a dangling
seat of a stalled fairish wheel jammed in mid-air.
Being poetically comatose is
a revelation of the vacuous nature
of spiritless weaving of words void of
purpose—whorl pooling emptiness sinking
deeper into illusionary nothingness.
Pregnant poetic minds do not just exist;
rather, they are living realities of the fertilization
of fertile wordings anchored in endometrial
contemplative cognitive growth.
The poem is not merely a mental ejaculation;
rather, it’s the result of spiritual incubation in
the mind’s womb and when the Supreme Creator
deems so, it is delivered:
the she-shed and man-cave are mere waiting rooms.