I’ve decided to join the Monday Poetry Train. Click here to visit Rhian’s blog, the writer behind this wonderful new idea. She also invites you to join the train and add your site to the links.
I think this is great. The world can always use a little more poetry.
Creation’s Battle
By Rinda Elliott
Frustrated afternoons spent
Grasping at elusive words
That swim just above a coherent plain.
Taunting in their dance of evasion,
They offer peekaboo glimpses of silhouettes,
Nothing but outlines
With misty, phantom cores.
You swallow a couple of anti-acids
To mask the burning restlessness in your gut.
A perpetual storm fueled by the knowledge
That maybe, just maybe
There’s something profound
In that chaotic realm of thought–
If only you could find
A clear path to the surface.
Without fail, ambivalence sets in.
You question a miserly vocation
That’s turned you into a mercurial servant of the pen,
And awarded you a sedentary lifestyle
With perks like carpal tunnel,
Pinched nerves,
And growing eyeglass prescriptions.
In defeat, you might push away from the desk
To find some mindless form of procrastination–
Anything to slow that relentless tide of pandemonium.
But the need will boil…
Insistent in your belly.
You curse this abrasive state of mind
That is, in truth, nothing more than fear,
Fear of the possibility
You have nothing important to say.
The trade-off?
Those good days when you face the fear.
You return to that desk with a calmer state of mind
And there, you witness a resurgence of words,
Still swimming, but now within your conscious reach.
You hold out webbed fingers
Snag one word, then another
They settle around you, change rhythm
Shifting smoothly into the flow of their original dance.
The only difference now is you,
Treading water, in their center.