It can be a hard thing to be a poet. To be every day pouring your soul out through your words, every day spinning them into magic like the tireless spider, each day hoping your silver net will catch a ray of sunshine in a dewdrop, and it that tiny microcosm, encapsulate a piece of your world.

And that is the fun part, the inspiration, the communing with the spirit that guides you…but after that, comes panning your river of words for gold among the rocks, the shaking of your pebbled poems, the cracking of them to see if they sparkle inside, the shaking off the dust and dirt that obscures them.

And this quiet work of refining can take years. Long enough for you to almost forget that you wrote the poems, that you spoke them into being with your sufferings and joys…and to wonder, now that you’ve squeezed out your soul, if anyone cares…or if everything you’ve said is outdated and unimportant.

And yet you yearn to hold this ethereal creation of yours in your hot little hands. To show it, to share it, to hold it up and say, “See? I have triumphed!” To celebrate it’s birth with the giddiness of a new mother and the delight of a child. And whether or not people buy this treasure of your soul (for less than the price of going out for lunch even) is …important, yes, but not essential…

No matter what happens to your book, now flown the coop of your computer, it has been created, and it is a victory. The bodiless angels themselves are marvelling at the human ability to tap their fleshy fingers, rumble air through their delicate throats and pour out song.

With these thoughts I comfort myself as the poetry project I’ve been working on for almost nine years comes to a close, and as the tenth anniversary of the loss of my daughter Josephine approaches, for whom I wrote my first poetry book, and for whose little siblings I’ve written this next one.

May my new book come into the light and fly away, so my hands will be free to write the next one, which is already printed on my heart.