Birth

I gave birth today

Not from my barren womb,

but from my heart strong and my soul true

My fingertips gripped the pencil, poised over unlined paper

I had to press down hard to deliver my racing thoughts

and tore a hole right through the middle of the page

But on I wrote

 

When I went to read my creation

I found the letters had shifted into unrecognizable garble

I jiggled the paper to reorganize my reflections

Still the patterns seem to spell no word

Had I been fleeced of original thought?

I shook and waved the crumpled paper more and to my horror

I saw that I was continuously dropping syllables

 

At this rate my poem was sure to perish

as surely as apples that wilt and wither with blight

And so now I’ve had to adopt some sort of ad-lib

Some off the cuff step-child and pass it off as art

~Melanie Thomason

2/19/2022