My Poems Are My Ingratitude Also Poem by Shalom Freedman

My poems are my ingratitude also
A litany of the negative
An endless confession of doubts and pains and anxieties and fears
And a forgetting and underplaying
Of the great and special blessings of my life
And this too out of fear
That to speak of what I have
Is to risk the punishment for the sin of pride
To risk losing it -

As if in all the years of my quite long life
I have not learned to not be imprisoned by
The principles of fear
Taught in childhood
And so, this too another piece of writing
Without the blessings and the gratitude for them
And instead, focused on the anxieties and self-criticism.