National Poetry Month #27

 I've finished the Holmesian competition questions - except the final, 10-pointer. It's a deciphering question and I've gazed at it, full-on and slant, until the words glowed. Nothing. It's like those "old" 3D eye-puzzles, which everyone seemed to be able to see, except me. I'm resigned that such analyticality is beyond me. (Yet, I did the Maths question without any problems!)

Anyway, having finished, as best I can, one project, my mind turned to National Poetry Month and the question of inspiration. Just where do poets get their ideas to write a poem?

Think about the most unlikely topic to write a poem about - and someone will have written a poem about it. A lobster being weighed? Done. (Paul Muldoon, Something Else) A retired pig farmer? Done. (Ni Chuilleanáin, Swineherd) A tree with coins stuck in its bark? Done. (Kathleen Jamie, Wishing Tree) A pondering rock? Done...

Rock by Jane Hirshfield

What appears to be stubbornness,

refusal, or interruption,

is to it a simple privacy. It broods

its one thought like a quail her clutch of eggs.

Mosses and lichens

listen outside the locked door.

Stars turn the length of one winter, then the next.

Rocks fill their own shadows without hesitation,

and do not question silence,

however long.

Nor are they discomforted by cold, by rain, by heat.

The work of a rock is to ponder whatever is:

an act that looks singly like prayer,

but is not prayer.

As for this boulder,

its meditations are slow but complete.

Someday, its thinking worn out, it will be 

carried away by an ant.

A Mystrium camillae,

perhaps, caught in some equally diligent,

equally single pursuit of a thought of her own.

........................................

How clever, that ending!

And for those who need to know, Mystrium camillae is an Indo-Australian ant that has the fastest recorded animal movement - it can snap its jaws at up to 320kph. Fast enough to catch a once-was-rock-now-grain-of-dirt.