Finding Self Again

For The Sunday Whirl poetry prompt: Wordle # 162
http://sundaywhirl.wordpress.com/

pigeons, mate, flutter, stuck, laugh, smile, face
report, survey, need, meeting, north, treat, squeak

Finding Self Again

Heartbeat flutters in chest
like pigeon stuck in coop
kept from doing one thing
she needs to be doing.

Spent months writing daily report.
Not allowing even a squeak
while surveying north to south
this map of self-imposed silence.

Smiles at thought to transform
face from what she has always
been mated to. Laughs aloud
as she flies through cloud of words.

Meeting this instinctual need,
treating herself to sweet basic
wish to create even more, perhaps
better, lines of poetry.

Elizabeth Crawford  5/25/14

Notes: Have been spending my time culling through thirty years of poetry, sifting through a mountain of paper, looking for the ones that will fit into book manuscript I am creating. Wasn’t sure about today’s wordle list, but then came upon something I wrote a long, long time ago. Had to laugh because, although it has nothing to do with the word list, it has everything to do with the subject of this current poem. Here is the old poem, and yes, I actually did try to quit writing poetry for a time, and kept my journal while doing so:

Surrender

Pen bleeds black ink.
Color of death
and deep darkness.

Lock it away. Refuse
to reach for its roundness
but it calls clearly
through layers of wood
and metal, where I’ve caged it.

Resist its cry.
Replace it with chocolate,
gain twenty pounds,
now nothing fits.

Pick it up again.
Lose physical hunger
inside jaws greased
by years of words
and breath that moves
heartbeat
far from stilled.

Elizabeth Crawford  2001?

Image is a pen and ink doodle manipulated into a template, then inverted from black on white to white on black.