The Finish Line is crossed. I woke in full moonlight coming through the curtain cracks. The final day has dawned. Except it is not dawn yet. As so many days over the past 365 days I have been up early doing my poetry practice. A year ago I began what I thought of as etudes, like those five finger warm ups my long ago piano teacher had me do. Except I was doing them in poetry. I knew I could write a poem a day for a month because I had done NaPoWriMo for two years during April. But somewhere around month three my friend in Maine, Sherri, began to refer to the posts as my Poetry Daily.

And for those faithful readers who have been good enough to stick with me for the year, fear not! I will be posting a Weekly Poem every Sunday. So there will be a poem tomorrow. Because the poetry writing will continue, just not the daily posts. I need to allocate that time to editting and manuscript development. But for the first few days there is a scheduled little poem to help soften the change in your daily routine, too.

By serendipity, in the clearing up and out yesterday I came upon a commonplace book I started with quotations that beguile me. Here is part of one from Ben Okri from While the World Sleeps.

The poet needs to be up at night, when the world sleeps; needs to be up at dawn, before the world wakes; needs to dwell in odd corners, where Tao is said to reside; needs to exist in dark places, where spiders forge their webs of silence; near the gutters, where the underside of our dreams fester. Poets need to live where others don’t care to look, and they need to do this because if they don’t they can’t sing to us of all the secret and public domains of our lives. They need to be the multiple witnesses around the central masquerades of reality in order to convey fully all the unimaginable dimensions of the deity’s terrible and enchanting dance.

Ben Okri, While the World Sleeps

I always think of Ben Okri as ‘the incomparable Ben Okri.’ You read a paragraph of his writing and you feel like you have attended a master class in writing and living. I am in awe of his wisdom and facility of his writing.

So here I am again in the dark. Using the illuminato pen which a faithful reader and friend Siobhán gave me last Christmas to facilitate writing in the amrit vela, these ambrosial hours before the world wakes

Thank you to the readers who have followed me on this writing a poem a day journey these past twelve months. I hope you will continue to check into the blog each Sunday. Some of you are known to me, through Facebook and real life. But others live on anonymously in cyber space. But I see you! And thank you for seeing me here, writing from an betwixt and between corner in rural Ireland.

Unmooring from the Margins

To go into the woods.
To watch as they chop
the last tree down.
To sometimes stick with the path.
To  then lift your feet from their margins
to adventure in the dark.
To learn to navigate by moonlight.
To master the fear of your own starkness.

Woods. And trees.
Paths. And journeys.
What else is poetry?
 
 Copyright © 2019 Bee Smith. All rights reserved