Midterm Change of Plans (and a Sonnet)

[georginasand]

So...something isn't working: it's not you, writing project, it's me. Or it's both of us. Clearly an essay and a poem is too much, because I am writing crap, and just getting stressed about the whole thing. And if I am stressed now, then keeping up during the school year is NEVER going to happen. So change of plans: a poem (which has now become sonnets--I can't do the free form thing) or an essay a week.  Ideally I will alternate, the essays are harder but good for me. However, I will be writing a lot of essays once school starts and I think in general I need to be less serious about this whole thing.

And now on to last week's (see I'm behind again) sonnet. Big Tent Poetry asked for a poem about a possession. I was going to write about my "Keep Calm and Carry On Mug" from the British Imperial War Museum (having just watch the Churchill Dr. Who) but when I realized I had left my notebook at home (I write at a coffee shop between taking my mother to work and going to work myself) and that I was consigned to writing on napkins--I realized that the one thing I always have is a blank page, I can't even escape by forgetting my notebook. And Thus:

Always With You
A sonnet on a napkin is a poor
ode to an empty page. But if absence
makes the heart grow fonder--for so says lore--
perhaps tomorrow I'll not forget. Dense notebooks
have not the give of coffee shop
napkins. They are not so easily thrown
to the bin. Or sneezed in. Words lost to glop
of colds: the casualty of a kind loan
to a sniffely friend or the sabotage
of a bashful poet? Notebooks have no
loophole. Words written there are there to lodge.
But those who seek the grace napkins bestow
 do not escape the true threat: without new
words, the empty page is always with you.



I remain,
Georgie