Prose/Poetry

Poem of the Day:
"All the Old Weapons" by Moira Egan
Spin


All the Old Weapons

Who's the one who said it? All the old weapons
poems lay down, bladelessly or just rusty
fall to prose in paragraphs safe as houses.
(Lock up the gun case.)

Here beside me pick out the weapons once you
used to slice through language or love. Achilles,
tent the blanket round us and heal these tenden-
cies past believing.

Ancient rhythm, cardiac wisdom beating
punctuates the body with rhyme and reason.
Silence treats us equally, linking pulses.
I hear your blood flow.

I'm the reliquary whose artist carved her
center's empty space to hold something sacred,
petrified as the bog-heart buried ages
I don't remember.

Absinthe, teardrop, water of life I may be
only drinking all that I know of useful,
bottles, battles, settlements, as I watch us
learning the language.


Today I spoke with a friend who asked me if I'd written anything lately. I promptly, and with regret, responded "no." Yet, upon reconsideration I retracted my first answer. I have been writing for a music blog for the past month, and that certainly is writing -- writing with deadlines and word limits. But, I have not written poetry in some months and this to me meant that I have not written. Period.

Read Egan's first stanza; prose is the 'new' dangerous, the gun case in the house, the 'middle-class violence.' But, the "old weapons" of poetry resound much more strongly within, and writing is not writing if it's not verse, and rhythm and metaphor layered upon metaphor.

A mental block perhaps; a difference in preference.


Sincerely,
A Poem A Day Audrey