Poetry Puttering

This morning, I tried something new.  I usually listen to a podcast or an NPR episode or Timothy Snyder's Yale class on the making of modern Ukraine while I scroll through Twitter and/or Facebook, and I can waste a lot of time that way.  Some mornings that's fine, especially if I've gotten a late start, and I'm feeling groggy or waiting for it to be time to do morning watch on my church's Facebook site.

This morning I hit the literal and figurative pause button and got one of my older purple legal pads.  I've been enjoying having a document of abandoned lines that are 9-13 syllables, the document that I created back in the spring for a class project writing duplexes.  Sometimes I start with one of the lines.  Other times, if I'm in the middle of a poem and feeling stuck, I look through the pages of the document; some times it gives me an inspiration, either for the stuck poem or for a new poem.  Even if it doesn't, I enjoy looking at those lines.

As I created that document, I realized I had good lines that fell outside of those parameters.  But I haven't gone back to create a new document.  This morning, it occurred to me that typing abandoned lines is the perfect activity for times when I don't feel quite ready to work on something that requires more of my brain, but when I want to do something more than mindless scrolling.

As I looked at a recent legal pad, I saw that some of the poems had check marks, which means that at some point I had typed them into the computer.  I didn't remember seeing them.  Happily, the Search feature found them.

You might ask why it was a problem, why I couldn't find them via my filing system.  Well, I confess, I used to type poems into my work computer, and in an ideal world, I e-mailed them to myself and copied the poem into my home computer and vice versa.  I also have several places where I tried to reorganize.  Suffice it to say, I'm happy to have a good search function so I don't have to do the searching myself through all the potential file folders.

I'm also happy to discover poems that I had forgotten that I had written, poems that made me smile and/or say, "Not too shabby."  Here are some closing lines from a poem about John the Baptist in older midlife (yes, he lost his head and died very young, so I suppose it's alternate reality John the Baptist in older midlife):

Once John the Baptist might have retreated

into the wilderness,

but now he prefers soft flannel pajamas.

As the light fades, he leaves

out food for the neighborhood 

cats that linger in the shade

of the ancient oak.