POETS ARE SKY ANIMALS

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Poetry is the journal of a sea animal
living on land and wanting to fly in the air.
~Carl Sandburg

I.
In fevered dream, she sat in class,
while others attended the teacher.
The words and thoughts
came thundering ~
a hurricane of horses
she could barely contain.
Scribbling faster and faster,
she was spinning
the straw of her life
into gold. 

She knew not where
the magic came from,
only that her pen must fly,
lifting her out of the pain of her life
into the freedom of the sky.

Ignoring all else,
she wrote it all down,
the words tumbling
from who knew where,
sprinkled with magic dust. 

II.
She wrote swiftly,
lest a strange little dwarf
with an unusual name
might come to take the gift away.
She kept his name close by,
the better to hold onto
her flying pen, for the moment
of triumph
when he’d rage at her
for all she had to say.
She would laugh at
having foiled him;
he’d put his foot
right through the floor,
then hobble, defeated,  away.

Teachers praised her flow of words,
making her feel exposed and odd –
feel Other, when she wanted
to belong.
And yet she could not
stop her pen.
It spun with its own power,
all through high school,
and the years that followed,
silenced only by marriage,
oppression and trauma,
those dark years that honed
and hollowed.

III.
Then Words began again,
(for they are always
right there, waiting).
Like the Pied Piper,
poems piped her away
from the years of captivity,
onto the freedom road,
the sky her GPS,
her heart fastened on Hope,
words charting the journey
of discovery, brave and bold,
spinning, ever spinning,
pain, joy, loss, love and memory
into gold.

With thanks to Elizabeth Crawford at Soul's Music,  for some excellent mentoring.