The Process of Poetry

We agonize and analyze and criticize; we wait

We cross it out and toss about the albatross of doubt

We mitigate and litigate, debate and contemplate

And cleave to the belief that we will hear the silence shout

We fill the quill with want and will until it fain must spill

We dare the air to sit and stare at us without a word

We pant, 'I can’t' yet know we shan’t give up, for oh, the thrill

To shift and sift where letters drift until a poem is stirred

We urge where surge of echoes splurge; to rein their essence in

We pray, oh may the Giver of all things guide our thought

We fumble, stumble, tumble through a world somewhere within

And then we write as thought takes flight; this is a poet’s lot

© Janet Martin