What is a Poem?

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What is a Poem?

What is a poem?
Hard work.
A single great line.
What we see and hear the moment before sleep takes us.
The pause between heartbeats.
The first touch of the drumstick on the tight stretch of drum
and the slight burring after.
A word discovered after an afternoon of trying.
An emotion caught in the hand, in the mouth.
Two words that bump up against one another
and create something new.
Hard work.

What is a poem?
Hard work.
Literature’s soul.
A touch of lemon swab on a parched mouth.
A son who smells of sweat instead of cigarettes.
A new word, like frass, which is what the caterpillar
leaves behind.
A story compressed to a paragraph,
a paragraph squeezed to a phrase,
a phrase pared to its essence.
Hard work.

What is a poem?
Hard work.
Emotion surprised.
Throwing a colored shadow.
A word that doubles back on itself, not once but twice.
The exact crunch of carrots.
Precise joys.
A prayer that sounds like a curse until it is said again.
Crows punctuating a field of snow.
Hard work.

What is a poem?
Hard work.
The space between a hummingbird’s wingbeats.
A child’s meddlefurs.
A whistle too high for a dog to hear.
One bloody word after another after another.
The graceful ellipse of memory.
The graceful collapse of memory.
The graceful lapse of memory.
The graceful lips of memory.
Hard work.

What is a poem?
Hard work.
Hard work.
Hard work.
Hard work.

~ Jane Yolen,
from Take Joy: A Book for Writers, 2003