reflection
A friend and I were discussing journaling, self reflection and expressing one’s thoughts and feelings in writing. He said he was challenged by the fact that everything seemed to be coming out “in a jumble.”
My experience is that it’s best to let ideas flow freely onto the page (or the screen as the case may be), and then to “organize” them after all that wants to come out is out. To illustrate my point, I flipped through one of my poetry notebooks to find a piece in which the final order of the stanzas was nothing like the order in which I had written them. My process is to write the poem in pencil (allows for erasing and changing!), and then, when it feels finished, to number the stanzas in the order I think they belong (see the picture under the poem below to know how I wrote this one originally).
Coincidentally, the poem I flipped to was one I had written about self-reflection several years earlier, but hadn’t posted yet. Here it is for your listening and reading pleasure:
reflection
© 2019 punkie
reflection
she lay upon
a velvet bank
her body supple
long and lank
in the mirror
of the surface
nothing wasted
nothing surplus
her face gazed back
from silken water
she wondered then
if she might falter
she broke the surface
with her hand
reached for the muddy
distant land
and plumbed within
the depths to find
what might be living
in her mind
the well was deeper
than she thought
filled with tears
her life had wrought
water fit fingers
like a glove
washed over pieces
of sunken love
no bottom there
was to be found
in places even
fish would drown
concentric circles
rippled silent
kissed the edges
became compliant
when lifetimes later
she withdrew
her thirst was quenched
herself renewed
© 2019 Susan Macaulay . I invite you to share my poetry and posts widely, but please do not reprint, reblog or copy and paste them in their entirety without my permission. Thank you.
