Tend With Care (Poem)

Tend With Care

Your future's

longing to reveal

its self-shaped

form, substance

like clay you ball up, poke, stretch

thin and push around.

Picture this:

At your potter's wheel,

centering

with body

entire, you spin luck's circle,

matching speed with force,

your hands wet,

pulling high, pushing

down, rhythm

a slow build

up to your new creation,

your opening made.

Stilled, hands feel

what coveted forms:

you readied

to add walls

then trim, cut away excess,

reveal you to be.

Now strike flint.

Where you burn inside

is your fire.

Stoke embers,

tend with care heat you apply.

Once burnished, glowing.

© 2011 Maureen E. Doallas

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I'm participating in the #Trust30 challenge, an online writing/reflection initiative for which a prompt is posted daily. All of the prompts to date are here.

This poem, in Shadorma form (each stanza comprising six lines of no or no set rhyme following a 3-5-3-3-7-5 syllabic pattern), is my response to the 14th prompt from author and entrepreneur Jonathan Fields:

When good is near you, when you have life in yourself, it is not by any known or accustomed way; you shall not discern the foot-prints of any other; you shall not see the face of man; you shall not hear any name; the way, the thought, the good, shall be wholly strange and new. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The world buzzes about goals and visions. Focus. Create a vivid picture of exactly where you want to go. Dream big, then don't let anything or anyone stop you. The problem, as Daniel Gilbert wrote in Stumbling Upon Happiness, is that we're horrible at forecasting how we'll really feel 10 years or 20 years from now — once we've gotten what we dreamed of. Often, we get there only to say, "That's not what I thought it would be", and ask, "What now?" Ambition is good. Blind ambition is not. It blocks out not only distraction but the many opportunities that might take you off-course but that may also lead you in a new direction. Consistent daily action is only a virtue when bundled with a willingness to remain open to the unknown. In this exercise, look at your current quest and ask, "What alternative opportunities, interpretations and paths am I not seeing?" They're always there, but you've got to choose to see them.

* * *

My responses to date, all in the form of poems, are:

Love One Cleared Path

Forward, No Turn Back

Ways In and Out

Getting the Rhythm

What You Imagine

Let Me Tell You

Unreal

Words to Live By

Birthplace

Answer in Time

Giving Meaning to Others

Zigzag

Fifteen Minutes to Count Down