Letter to the Young Poet Who Stole My Lines
I've used up three legal tablets thumbing
through the alphabet for words civil enough
to be left on paper. How do I tell you
entire poems fray at the edges when pluckedfrom their nests and told to hold their own
among the wiggly legs of new born strangers?
Learn to move more slowly through the language.
Whole poems wait there simply for the taking.You must be like a child in a fine candy shop.
You may look all you want but you may touch nothing
unless you're willing to pay for it. You must
wade into the history of things taking everythingyou own with you. You must learn to ponder what
you discover there. Somewhere in the silence
the poems will find you. You must learn which words
best define you and braid them carefully into your artwithout tampering with the celestial machinery.
Language is illusive and expensive stuff.
You must learn to gather its atoms with one hand
and write down their names with the other.copyright 2007 Fredrick Zydek
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Barnwood magazine
Contents 07