Inscribed

An intake of breath;
Inspiration;
A sigh,
The words of which,
Whispering and new
Hang like fog upon the air.

Sound rises
Out of silence;
Sound, shaped by utterance,
Speaks or dumbly rejoins it.

In the spoken word's
Codified conversation,
Dialogue is made.

The written word
Records its scrawl;
Script or hot metal
Forges and fuses it;
Pixellated, imagination's
Captive backlit meaning
Shines its light.

So shapes on the page,
By key, by nibbed instrument,
Hand-guided patterns draw
Waveforms of inner voices
Till story unfolds in narrative,
Till thought forms action
And action thought again.

Poets and scribes
Cram whole worlds
Inside their heads
Force the ways
To see them
Through their own eyes
And fingers.

What do we do
To tell it?
And why must we,
Voices raised,
Declaim, perform,
Strut the stage
Or smudge the page?

Out damnèd spot!

Out the blemishes
Of soul and heart
The aching hurt
Our awe, our ire,
Our bleak desire
All the wanton dreams we keep
Livid and hidden in our sleep
Our fear and hope
The yards of rope
At whose end we'd dance;
All reviews and epitaphs
The suicide notes
Our wordy efforts chance
To leave behind us
Till futures find us
Or blind us
Or never mind us.

Verse and rhyme run on
And reasonless run out
As if singing the world
Makes it more a song
Than living ever would.

Letters in the earth
For what they're worth
Grow like threading shoots
Arching stems twist heavenwards
Blank leaves bloom into words
And words bloom lexicons.

Littered, lettered,
So inscribed, recorded like grains
Of earth, each a chit of truth
Unfathomed in the fallow ground
From which it springs.

Out, out, out! A cry to heaven!

Let it be known
The seed be sown
Truth be spoken
More than token speech
Or ill-scanned metre.
Let none of it be out of reach.

Let it be.
Let the poem be made!

© BH 2015

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Something for National Poetry Day 2015. Had to be about the makings. The subject comes up from time to time. Poets everywhere are asked why? or ask the question of themselves. Here I am asking again.

What’s more, some of it rhymes. If you're looking for light, it's hidden.