A Blessing

Spring is here, nagging me just like that black headed chick-a-dee in back that keeps calling to its mate his fee bee call. I imagine him saying “You-hoo, you-hoo.” Her answer, “I’m here, I’m here. (Kind of comforting) Still, I put in my time at the computer, ignoring as best I can the lusted-after sun and warmth and green stuff.

Winter was a real bear this year. Gray and dull, with snow on the ground way to long, but the daffodils are blooming and I have an old canning jar; I’m happy.

Working furiously on poetry. It is, after all, Poetry Month. I decided to put aside my editing on Heart’s High and take the month to work on my chapbook. I have made huge strides adding to my goal of 20-30 polished poems that will fit into a book.

Some poems I developed into what I think will be good contest entries, too, others I’m struggling with. That’s all right, though. I’ve found the poems I have the hardest time carving into what I’m trying to say, please me most, in the end. Now, that is not to say, they are my best poems.

Funny how that happens, the poems I like best are rarely the ones that strike a chord with anyone else. I guess that is the nature of poetry, though.

I’m not done, by no means. There are several poems in rough state, still in need of a lot of work—finding words and rhythm and rhyme. The work has saved me, though. Life has been a rough patch for some months. Nothing everyone else isn’t going through, but instinctively I reach for poetry work when I’m struggling with work, home, money, the blues.

Every time, it has saved me. The blessing of that, the reward of that, is that I don’t have to win a contest, get the book published, have a one of my poems reach the light of day. I just need to work them and let them save me.

And isn’t that the blessing of being a writer? I knew there was one.