Day 11 NaPoWriMo - Epistolary

 Emily,

The wind blows like a tapestry through the power lines; they crackle like a blanket with static and I am without direction. I sit on a rock contemplating time, the commodity I have so less of and soon will have none. If I spend my life giving to others, I will diminish like a chord, fraying. I will be undone, unwoven.

What advice can you give me except to live? Stop living in a future that is not here. I can only give it a voice here with you on these pages and hope that you have some words, poetry or not, that can bring me to the present and braid me back into place, maybe a chord looser than before, but in some semblance of order and balance.

I hope you are well and are finding peace and contemplation among your things.

With Love & Poetry,

Britt M.

 

Britt,

I cannot say the future nor divine it with cards, tarot, dice, or tea leaves. The wind blows here as well, but it blows past daffodil petals, crocus, and cherry. Spring did not want to come, but it came. Slow, dragging its feet. I think of you as the spring. You are so in love with the dark and the cold of winter, that you must be coaxed out of your cave, reassured again and again. When spring finally arrives, slow and hesitant, you never understand why you resisted at all in the first place. Especially when you feel the sun on your face.

I am not one to change, nor are you. All poets, I fear, are always trying to stop time, close our hands around it, make it small, so we can have some certainty. And yet, poetry feeds on change and the state of ambiguity, poetry rests within and outside of time.

Our grappling and struggles, our fruitless endeavors, make poetry poetry. Whatever the future brings, whatever events and changes, they will make great poetry. And in that, rest assured, that is the giving you must give yourself, when you feel you have given all yourself away. You are a well, deeper than you think. There are many buckets that can be taken, but the rain always will come to fill you up again.

I have my own fears and insecurities. My own lonely treading heart. I envy you, your family, your adventures, the noise of children. Life is simpler than we let ourselves believe. Poetry helps me see this, and I know poetry does the same for you.

With Love & Poetry,

Emily D.