The Poet's Plight-Fight-Fright-Rite/Write

I cringe beneath the critic's eye

Yet crave honest un-flattery

Lest I should run ink-rivers dry

With shadows of half-poetry

I blush to feel them crush the page

Splattered with pieces of my heart

While learning to embrace the wage

As rejection finetunes the art

I laugh and weep, am lost, then found

Drawn from despair's unholy brink

Toward the Holy Parchment Ground

Of a blank page begging for ink

Janet Martin