Book cover photo from Wikimedia Commons
The Empty Page
This time of year perhaps the empty page
Should be black instead of white
Bleak and wet and heavy with hibernation
Lie weighty and soggy on the silent desk
Waiting for some harbinger some hope
To leaven the wintry landscape within
Perhaps the page were better made of ice
That I may strap on the old hockey skates
Once more and finding that perfect stretch
Of cold weather without snow strike off
Across the perfect surface taking flight
Without a single word to shatter the ecstasy
© Bill Prindle, 2017
4 comments:
Bill, you are a harbinger, whitewashing the black page to its essential whiteness with your poem. "To leaven the wintry landscape within." Your poem gives hope to us all. You found a perfect stretch of words. Helen Kanevsky
Bill, what an excellent expression of the mood when one is looking at the blank page in winter.
Love these images!
Nice sound play in these lines, Bill: perhaps/page; black & white/bleak & wet; have/hibernation; soggy/silent; harbinger/hope; leaven/landscape; and other alliteration. The blend of sounds in "that perfect stretch/Of cold weather without snow strike off."
The words and iambic pentameter of the opening line have a haunting echo of Shakespeare's Sonnet 73 ("That time of year thou mayst in me behold"), another wintry poem.
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