To be a poet is not to sit idle and dream.
It is to move and embrace, to scribble and ponder,
to scramble for paper and pen.
It is not to sigh longingly at wind in the trees,
to be a superficial student on university grounds,
dreaming and never knowing sorrow.
It is to truly know the meaning of sweet pain,
to love every point of hurt that pours into
and then out of you.
It is to welcome with open arms and eyes
all the hurt, to internalize and translate this hurt
into silken words, easily digestible.
It is to strive in vain to change pain into
a delicate art, to protect the people from
knowing the tragedy that inspired the words.
To be a poet is not to be silly, superficial, sweet.
It is to undertake the exhausting task of
tending the garden of minds and souls,
pulling up the angry weeds that split the ground
before anyone else sees, before anyone has to see.
We are guardians of naivety, us poets.
We are underappreciated, as people
ignore our flowery words and weighty messages
and run off into the forest of thorny pain for themselves,
only to realize much too late
that our arms were already covered
in scratches.
It never dawns on them that our quick
and practiced care of their injuries
(for they have them when they’ve run out again)
sprang from the need to heal ourselves first.
No one thinks of the poet as broken, bleeding.
But we all are. We just use our blood as ink
to pen our entreaties that you all be careful.
The world will scratch you, so we provide the
tools to bind your cuts, to forget the pain.
It is hard to heal the world,
when all you do is sit idle, and dream.
