Last night, I wrote a new poem in my dream. I haven’t written new poems in a long time. The subject of this poem wasn’t extraordinary: a rust-colored horse with long hair. It was a slender poem of tercets, a concatenation of little trios.
Alas, after waking, I couldn’t remember a single word from the poem! New poems are rare nowadays, but there are seasons… hundreds of old poems sitting in a writing box, old poems aging like autumn leaves… yet they don’t lose their resilience and go brittle.
Or more like old honey deep in the tree, age-darkened. Is the word hygroscopic or hydrophilic for water-loving? Honey is miscible with water. I heard something happens, a mysterious chemistry as honey ages, loses water, distills….like poetry in a way.
You go back to the old dark honey, harvest it, refine it, and pour the honey into jars. Or, if you’re impatient, you pour the raw honey into jars and put the jars on the kitchen sill where the morning light burns red, amber, gold, all the shades of autumn.
Somewhere, a horse with long hair shakes out the early chill.
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prayer postscript: Seasons of writing, seasons of words… other seasons, the rain falls but never touches the earth, and we’re still grateful.
second prayer postscript: Lost poems don’t always return… but we may rejoice in the gift of reminscence.
KAREN AN-HWEI LEE 