The Journey of a Poet's Heart

 PAD Challenge day 2: write a voyage poem

The journey of a poet’s heart defies

The commonness of ordinary things

For threaded through life’s hellos and good-byes

We find frayed filigree of our heart-strings

My, my, how thought traverses fluently

The Bygone with its everlasting keep

Why, just this morning It murmured to me

Rousing my want from nothingness of sleep

I reach to touch its warm whisper again

It fades to naught; save in my weeping pen

The journey of a poet’s heart implores

Each space of air diurnal to the crowds

A money-minded man glibly ignores

The agony of gold on gilded clouds

But we, vexed by word-possibility

Are spellbound by a wounded, wafting thought

Or haunted by a world that cannot be

Save for the bravery of bleeding jot

Like pipe-smoke on a sultry summer’s eve

The curl of consonants and vowels weave

The journey of a poet’s heart regales

Perimeters achieved by ink alone

Dusk droops its dark on moorland yet unveils

A world only to bards and beggars known

We suffer, yet delight within the thirst

Of paintings framed where drifters pause to see

This Thing by which we are both blessed and cursed

As Night and Day lays bare its poetry  

While we scavenge its deep for shadow-shards

Time’s autograph of Hours disregards

© Janet Martin

The last line in this poem is the first line that 'hatched' as I pondered the journey of a poet's heart, but that  is the way it is...sometimes we climb backwards to get to the beginning!