.
It’s waiting –
blank notebook paper
on my clipboard,
the kind I’ve always used,
college ruled
with a red line down the margin.
My pen is made
from recycled plastic
with blue gel ink
and feels good between my fingers.
Remember those leaky fountain pens
we had in grade school
that we filled from a bottle?
My favorite ink was peacock blue.
One Christmas my mom
gave me a ball point “quill” pen
with a fluffy pink feather plume
and matching ink.
Holding it I felt like Emily Dickinson,
a fountain of words,
inspiration and opinion,
countless pink poems of love
and injustice
followed by a stunned poem
when Kennedy was shot
two days after my 17th birthday.
Then came poems of indignation
about the war in Vietnam
and what was wrong with long hair,
mini-skirts and bare feet?
Ah, but I digress.
.
Now my muse
puts a finger to his lips
and tells me hush,
this is just non-poetic prose
after all.
He came to me
in a dream one night
arms folded sternly across his chest.
I wanted to pull them open,
wrap them around me,
kiss his face,
but he turned away.
I woke to find my pen
filled with invisible ink.
Can he see this,
or are these words
just feathery plumes of dust?
.
© 2013, 2016 Betty Hayes Albright
.
(re-post)
Seasonings 