The Reader

The shapes of my days

are glazed

by other people's walks

and ways;

I hold my pen so

 and ever thus

Shakespeare's quill, or

Woolf at her desk,

or Blake beside his printing press

or Austen stealing time, away,

from household chores, and bores

and sisterliness.

We write to know

we are not alone,

We read, because

we know

they lived and breathed

and fought and scored

in petty, churlish wars.

And won their way

through life and love

while being just as afraid

 as me, today,

as I, who write

but read more,

so much more,

to re-assure my lonely heart

that I can never stand apart

from those that went before me.

- Shaista, 2011

Anne Hathaway in Becoming Jane, 2007

Rudolf Ernest, 'The Reader', 1854-1932

April is National Poetry Month and today, Terresa Wellborn, poet blogger at The Chocolate Chip Waffle, is celebrating my poetry at her waffle house. You met her once before, when I did, last December. Here is one of her creations - she writes in a way that impresses and absorbs me; when I read her I am back at university, awed by my reading of Poets who truly craft and graft into the sublime, and never did I imagine she would cross an ocean to arrive on my doorstep, and wander the cobbled streets of Cambridge with me...

INFINITE HOUSES

The sky darkens in notes,

I wade into pines gathered like quills,

their evergreen feathers,

their infinite houses. 


They speak nothing of

their windowless wisdom,

their stretch of days,


of standing so long on the same legs,


arms held out in prayer.

They absorb the shock of seasons,

the hail of years rocking down.

I know nothing of their clock tick,

their inched climb, their roots

pulling like a hymn,

grow,

 grow.

--Terresa Wellborn

© 2010 by Terresa Wellborn. All rights reserved.