I wrote this in writers group on May 1. I wasn’t really happy with it, it didn’t flow easily as “left-hand writings” did in the past. But the group liked it, which made me cry. So I post it here.
I want to write a poem, but I don’t know how to say it. The sky was almost black behind trees lit yellow by the sun. Yellow, not of leaves but of seeds, catkins, odd tassels hanging from the twigs. Gold and black. Diving deep into darkness. What’s down there? old words, moldering into roots, disappearing into soil. But there’s more than roots and soil, there are a million fibers of odd organisms weaving it all together. There are no individual Things, there are only interweavings and language can’t speak truth but gropes and stutters. Then something new happens. Birds fly through and things break up and fall apart into new patterns, like the tassels on the tree that look like leaves in another light. Daffodils and violets and crocus, no reds yet, but green and more green. Water reflects sky changing colors swiftly. Rain falls like thunder, then the sun again. Drops and bigger drops and light opens behind the sky — beyond its endless end. The winds swing the branches, wild winds changing color as they go. Then there’s an emptiness waiting… waiting… a black feather drops. a sign from Raven. The wild winds do blow, and storms and seasons pass, everything fades into something else. We forget, as the light comes back into the sky, that the darkness held all our secrets which opened and fell and tumbled across the beach and waves slid by showing their transparent green underbellies. Nevertheless things do change and changing again and changing rings different tones. The ring of the thrushes call lost now as their winter refuge is a clear cut effigy of a forest.
These poems were written at the time of Journey into Courage. They pretty much wrote themselves, I think because the feelings were so alive in me at that time. I think they are the only real poems I have written. I always thought the “left hand writings” were the raw material for poems.