The darkness of a poet's heart

A poet's heart - K.W. 2011

Once upon the time there lived inside a poet a bunch of little naughty poems.

They dwelled all together in a dark and secret place deep into the poet’s soul, where nobody could hurt them or make fun of them, but as they grew and grew they began to long to be out in the sunlight which they had only seen far up and away, through the pupils of the poet’s eyes.

And so it came to pass one day that the eldest, boldest poem, despite the poet’s warnings, escaped into the world and went to live alone in a far off place, where it thought it might meet its Muse one day.

It is not known if it ever met this Muse or not, but it had never much counted on it, because even a little poem knows that muses are touchy, aloof creatures. Still, the poem was happy to sit there in the wind and sun and meet people sometimes, and life in the open didn’t seem so dangerous after all.

And so one day another poem, the youngest and smallest poem, escaped too. It was a cheeky little verse with no shyness at all, and one day, lo and behold, the great Muse of All Poems picked it up, and patted it on the head and paid it a nice compliment.

Then there was great tumult in the poet’s soul, and all the poems rebelled and made a great mutiny, and some of them jumped off the poet’s walled heart and out into the wild world, because they thought that they had a better place to go.

But the Muse who had lured them out was not there to catch them when they fell, and they felt very silly and confused and a little bruised, and so, after a while, a bit shamefaced, one by one, they all quietly returned home.

And there they are to this day, huddling together in silence, safe and hidden, in the echoing darkness of the poet’s heart. And if ever they long to see the light of day, they only look at it from far, far away, through the skylit pupils of the poet’s eyes.

K.W. 2011