When a poem finally comes
I know there must have been a reason for all those damn mornings blinking in the light and trying to contemplate existence before breakfast (holding a pen over the blank page, wordless to tears, hearing too much or too little and gathering nothing to say).
Rosie-the-bulldog poses outside the café window, unchained and waiting for her master; Korean War Veterans sit at tables with girls of eighty and flirt the same way they must have when they were all in their twenties, over coffee; I try to write, pretend to read, and instead send you secret pictures of Rosie.
And when the poem comes I forget it all.
I feel like a bulb has burst in my brain (like Katie’s paper whites on the windowsill, sitting in water for so many months until at last, a shoot of green, a bud, a blossom within two days).
There is a frantic flowering, too, in my heart (I must not forget that I can only write when I have been praying).
[h]
