Poesy

What is a poem ?

A rising confluence ?

A boiling spot where

emotions and ideas

meet and spill over into

imagination's flood

to form a mesh of words

shored against 

the backdrop wall

of the mind's eye?



Or possibly a bunch of gathered thoughts,

Scooped up as you walked along 

for days and days,

The hedgerows thronging with them.

You come back in to sit,

The quiet of the kitchen pungent

with the abundant bunches which

tumble and scatter in your attempt

to put them down.



There they lie, 

Itinerant discordants,

Jostling for position,

Bedraggled things,

That you fumble to arrange

in some loose knit way.




Write a list before

you write it down ;

- Bath mats

(for your grown-up child),

plus other things you'd like to buy

to prop her up because

you feel she cannot exist upright

without you.


(How quaint.

How funny.

When she's wondering how

to make you feel ok

about her absence

on her birthday ) .



Now turn the paper over

and compose,

This poem;

Some words to prop me up,

To make me feel an 

adult on the occasion of

my daughters' 20th birthday.



A poem as crutch,

As wondering,

And thinking about.

As proxy,

and love itself,

Words to quell,

To soothe,

To expiate,

To visualise.

A list of things,

A kind of spell,

That makes a posy

for a birthday.