In the dark and wooden dust.
Too many silent years stained
The brown-edged paper’s folds.
The smell of cheap pine lingered
Behind ill-fitting dovetails
By whose feeble daylight
One hand first made it,
Seized from nothing, a poem,
Words common and uncommon,
Strung together lines,
Worked until they seemed to agree
One with another, set aside
Like a song transcribed left unsung,
Like a conversation considered but never spoken.
Then stolen in a look, by a sly hand
Crumpled, carried off in love or envy,
Uncreased in secret moments,
Read, hidden away, repeated.
A poem out of sight crumbles into grit:
Words unheard unravel, useless letters
Scabbed on yellowed parchment,
Fading, decaying, longing for light.
Withdrawn for a thief’s lonely eye,
The same words, revealed, realign,
Silently gather time and distance,
A different poem already.
In such a moment, read by stumbling lips,
The poem is amended. Thought alone changes it.
Pen or key rewrites, yet no-one owns it:
Change, truth breathing, is story in the air.
In every poet’s heart, or memory,
As in all our mouths and minds,
Words circle like vultures around our bones
Settling to pick at them in crackling hunger.
A stolen poem is still itself, in fact,
The stages of composition made alive,
Not belonging to any but itself.
This poet or that should lay no claim.
Taken, hidden, stolen, the crime of it,
Is not to write out another’s work
Nor read aloud, nor claim its birth,
But to keep it dead so long.
© BH 2013
I think Andy McCallum Crawford coined the title in a Facebook thread. Since I've pondered the poetic function over the years, it seemed worthy of a poem of its own.
I mean, how can we claim ownership of a sequence of words? Once sequenced and shared they'll be split up, rephrased, re-emphasised.
'That is not what I meant at all;, that is not it, at all…'
Tommy Stearns was right, maybe. Hah! Tommy Stearns: sounds like a stand-up. Perhaps, that's what poets are. Stand-up comedians without the jokes. Mostly.
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