Monday, April 24, 2023

Struggling with Self

 Will I ever write again? I think about it a lot and avoid doing anything about it! I have withdrawn into my self for too long. It hurts to write but not writing hurts too.

Every poem was a secret
struggle with himself,
every secret was a struggle,
a handwritten scrawl,
something joyous
or terrible,
a fragmentary
blood-soaked message
wrenched out of his body,
a longing for
some impossible harmony
tucked into a bottle
and tossed off the side of a cliff.
Reckless love poems, shocked elegies
drafted against death
looking for God—
some of them shattered
in desperation
on the rocks below,
but others, like this one,
bobbed away
on surging blue waves
for someone to find them.

by Edward Hirsch