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The Prisoner

If you have not a bird inside you,
      You have no reason to sing.
But if a pent bird chide you,
      A beak and a bleeding wing,
      Then you have reason to sing.

If merely you are clever
      With thoughts and rhymes and words,
Then always your poems sever
      The veins of our singing-birds,
      With blades of glinting words.

Yet if a Song, without ending,
      Inside you choke for breath,
And a beak, devouring, rending,
      Tear through your lungs for breath,
      Sing—or you bleed to death.

—Louis Golding (1895–1958), “The Prisoner,” Sorrow of War, 1919

Ease your sweet heart

Mother dear —

You worry about me
because I write sad poems —

But I promise you:
I am okay —

Writing purges my frustrations
and vents my steam
the pen is my psychiatrist
and ink my medicine —

When life feels off-balance
back to the writing board I go
I do not hide but seek
my emotions in words
and blot them on the paper
which blots it all out of my soul —

You see sad words, but to me
all my poems are happy
because creating them heals me —

Guaranteed, and believe me
because I love you so:
your daughter is just fine —

If ever I stop writing poems
that is when you should worry.

Terri