Astrologer tells the Poet...

"All poets need to wander
Through the bramble and the bush
Through the labyrinths of city streets
Lost and listening
In a foreign land
Till they find themselves
Cast up—
Upon the ragged edges
Of some blank
And questioning page.

All poets need to wander
The untrodden routes
And unclocked byways
Of memory
Till they’ve shaken off
The familiar ways
And unexamined life
The way a dog
Shakes off his sluggishness,
Then bounds back
Into the scent of a place,
A time, a story.

All poets need to wander
Through labyrinths of lines
Saturating their pages
With cries and shouts and sounds—
Raging against the sorrows
That have no voice—
Bestowing meaning where
There once was none,
Bestowing blessings
Upon the luminous
Yet ravaged landscapes
Of our lives.

All poets need to wander
Through blackened pages
Of spilled wine and words
Till finding themselves once again
Kneeling and kissing the ground—
They find the words that
Allow us to hear
As if for the first time—
The sound
Of our one true voice.

All poets need to wander
Till they hear themselves say:
“And this is how it was for me”
Then listen to hear how others too—
Have also caught the way:
How light has entered their lives
And then left; how night comes,
And morning follows…
How different and yet the same
Held together by
This one uncommon life.

All poets need to wander…."

Elizabeth Spring July, 2008
elizabethspring@aol.com