The Poet is an albatross (III)

 

No matter how prodigious the wings,

No matter how resilient their feathers,

No matter how far they extend…

At some point

The poet’s wings will falter.

Words and thoughts plunge into the big still

And the poet must endure the minutes,

Hours and days as if strung up on the tree,

Blind to events, severed

From the pulsing heart, the poet’s lungs

Laboring to inflate and the poet’s sacred voice silent.

At such times the poet must then be patient;

Let the tiredness settle, let it weigh down the words

Until the curving words and all their possible connotations,

The flowing sentences and their musical enraptures,

sink into oblivion — dare them to be gone forever!

And in that moment the poet’s strength returns,

The feathers flutter as words and rhythms return

Like green leaves and the albatross takes flight once more;

Heads into the great trajectory across the globe, migrating

Across the lines of other poets, other thoughts, other rhymes

Remaking everything, recreating and soaring into the blue.