Writing Poems

Revision

My notebook, left by mistake
all night on the garden table
has been revised by rain -

blurs and dribbles swims
the lakes and swallow seas
of its brimming pages.

Put in the oven to dry
drought begins to crinkle
the lip of every puddle -

and what comes out is a shell,
crisp and hollow and curled
around a fall of rain.

- Charles Bennett, How To Make a Women Out of Water

**

The Notebooks

To turn again these faded pencilled pages,
Their neatly cancelled lines, precisely dated,
Their doodles of frustration, sudden rages
Or mocking self-contempt, before the next
Refining or reduction's contemplated,
And then the immaculate and final text -

This is to hear you speak, not just to read you,
Familiar words-by-heart plumbed deep and strange
Down to the nerve of hurt, the pains that feed you
Raw as they are, a present tense, not past,
Thronged with the power to strengthen through their change,
Poised to their lines we know and built to last.

- Anthony Thwaite, The Dust of The World