On Writing Poetry

I wrote a poem on my birthday, which was at the beginning of May. Poetry writing is a mystery. It is a mystery to me why sometimes a poem just seems to pop out of my subconscious up to the page before me. At other times only a germ or a seed emerges and then there is so much painstaking watering and planting, weeding and pruning, and then replanting and more watering to be done– so much is required before the poem can thrive, become itself, and give its perfume and joy to others.

Then of course, sometimes it just shrivels up. I have discovered that in trying to grow potted plants there is something called overwatering. It’s like helicopter parenting. You hover so assiduously over the sprout in your care that you rob it of its natural resilience. The same can be true for a poem. Too much fussing can rob it of its innocent and pure self.

Then again sometimes you might discover what you thought was a poem is actually something quite different– a letter to a friend, a contract, or an old discarded receipt for something you never wanted in the first place. Sometimes you don’t know what it is that has come out of you until you leave it for a bit and come back to it.

So I have come back to what I wrote on my birthday, and I think, yes, it is a poem. So here it is: a poem that marvels that, having lived seven decades on this earth, I still feel more or less as I did when I was seven: that although the past may have been a wintery place of terror, the storms are for the moment over, and I am here, safe in the beauty and wonder of things, and life beckons