"The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish." ~ Robert Louis Stevenson



Thursday, April 14, 2016

An empty mind can offer little aid

An empty mind can offer little aid
To craft a poem close to midnight’s stroke.
The blinking cursor on the screen displayed
Derides me typing words I then revoke.
A frantic grasp for some elusive thought
Yields nothing worth expressing in this verse,
A stream of consciousness with nothing caught,
A vague ambition I cannot coerce.
But now a starting line appears and stays;
The rhyme and meter motivate the rest;
Though not profound or likely to amaze,
It seems that something real has coalesced.
This finished work thus illustrates a crime:
Attempted sonneting while pressed for time.


~ Tamary Shoemaker
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
(I was tempted to call this poem "Blank Verse," referring to a mind going blank, but as a former English major, I just couldn't bring myself to label it inaccurately.)

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