Writing what feeds me

I finished writing a sonnet today. It took me a couple of days of wrestling, but I finally settled into a piece that worked relatively well. I was pleased with it...for a time.

Then a friend posted something about his own process as he labors at composing a piece of music, and I looked at my feeble, barely adequate, "lovely" (what a pallid descriptive!) poem and saw it for the mediocrity it is. There is no light in it. Sigh.

Honestly, I wrestle with writing. It tasks me and I argue with it and the words tangle up into massive snarls behind my eyes until all I can do is communicate in terse blandnesses, all flavor leached away in the mental stew. That being said, writing poetry feeds me in a way that other writing absolutely doesn't. There's a satisfaction in a solid line, the way it rings when the longing and the language come together. There's a joy in searching for the line that I cannot quite find. That sounds odd, I know, but that act of stacking words up into ideas and tearing them away again until I hit just the right pattern...that's fun! The moment of finding, when I write a line and shivers stalk across my scalp...that's fun too, but not the same way.

Anyway, I am going to put that sonnet right here:

Had I but wit and words to speak my heart,
I'd shout your praises to the listening sky.
I hear your velvet-gravel voice and I
Must melt and burn, but words far from me dart
Just simple syllables in fits and starts
Fall from my tongue. Struck dumb when you are nigh
I cannot tell you how your twinkling eye
Does warm my soul yet tangle up my art.
But there are times we sit in silence warm,
Full sweet. The stillness shared by our like minds
Eliminates the need for empty speech.
Then, I don't fear that I am lacking charm.
Your life and mine the tie of friendship binds,
So without words our hearts speak each to each.

By Mary Dedwydd verch Gwallter
04/06/16

It is a mediocrity, lacking in almost every way, but the journey still happened, my soul was still fed. I will celebrate that at the very least, and come back to write more tomorrow. I will wrestle, and maybe find what I seek and maybe not, but the wrestling alone is worth it.