The Birth of a Poet

The Birth of a Poet

Rhythm. I knew it before I knew light;
Learned from my mother’s heartbeat,
Resounding in the darkness where I was knit together.
Rhyme. I knew it before I had breath;
My own heart mimicking hers,
Rising and falling to the cadence of her pulse.
Reason. Carried in life’s blood, it nourished me,
Passing into my body through that membrane of love,
Whose scar we all bear.
Rhyme, rhythm and reason formed me in the womb.
And so, I was born a poet.

Breath. I used that first one well;
Wailing my first poem into the Universe’s open mic.
Death. It listened intently, snapping fingers in praise of my verse.
“Too small, too early, too fragile!” said death in critique.
It tried to claim me; letting its cold breath creep towards my tiny chest.
Poets are wily and I hid in a Plexiglas box, lungs filled with warm air.
Struggle. Rhyming with life was hard for a newborn bard.
We must all learn life’s form, cadence and timing.
No one knows more about life than death.
It became my tutor, not my master.
I was born a poet. A dead poet.
 

Growing. The poet becomes the poem.
From a three-line haiku I became a fourteen-line sonnet.
Lines were penned, removed and rewritten. I strayed into the margins.
Sorrow. From such is art created.
I became a saga, with too many pained lines to mention.
The pages of my musings were torn and tattered.
Balance. The rhyme of joy and sorrow.
The light in the darkness, the hope in despair.
Life rhymes with death. Growth comes with pain.
A poet knows how to blend these all in rhythm.
I was born a poet. I became on old one.

Old. Dead. Yet breathing still.
Life stirs in death’s ashes.
There remains rhythm, reason, beat and time.
So, for better or worse,
I still have to rhyme.

j.w. McKinleyville, 5/14/25