Why I Write Today
I come home singing with the last night and the first morning star ~Natalie Goldberg, from her poem Top of My Lungs This morning I ask myself why I still write poems and if it's worth the time. But I know that poetry is part of my story. Words inside my lungs, part of the millions of alveoli. I breathe in words, and exhale them in sentences cottoned together as clouds that don't need to be explained. Someone will gaze at the clouds I breathe out and feel enveloped. Sending out poems to get published is one of the stumbling blocks of my life. Other poets have persistence but I peter out, return to myself and leave the breathing words in my notebook. Finished, unfinished, asleep, poems dreaming of attention. In 5th grade I wrote a Christmas poem at the behest of our teacher, desperate to make the lines rhyme and be chosen for publication in our 2-page school newspaper. No, I didn't win that one heroic spot of words typed and read aloud in class. It wasn't me. I