What Is The Next Step? Poem by Terence George Craddock (Spectral Images and Images Of Light)

told my cousin Chris
i was going to out write
every past classical poet
this year (that was in 2011)

put an average of 100 poems
a month on line...
Chris replied with one word BS

that was April 16th 2011
needed to write 600 new poems
that year alone...

in truth i had already out written
almost all past classical poets
these great artists had often written

novels essays plays short stories
i write none of these marvels
i was merely writing my poems

next to catch on my shrinking list
final last magnificent seven
were on 534 Aussie Henry Lawson

master of plays on 550 William Shakespeare
master of lyric on 561 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
popular poetess on 571 Ella Wheeler Wilcox

all sing lines of fascinating allure siren calls
Nobel Prize Literature on 593 Rudyard Kipling
then months long lonely haul to cloud heights

Bard of the Yukon on 832 Robert William Service
crafted persona on then 1123 Emily Dickinson
all i esteemed in awe delight their literary heights

i kept my rare masterpiece best posted the worst the rest
ah sheer delight to think in verse to write to write at last
crazy never worked so hard later often worked all night

i had a focus a standard a bar a goal a philosophy of poetry
i never said what i would write would be good or what
i thought of what i wrote i wasted little time on interaction

comment was all locked self contained in verse writ
race was on half run those who can do love every bit
of creation imagination muse who calls cannot be caught

awesome to have time for that kind of inspiration
"but you did it? " "yes i did it, i believed"
although before i started it was impossible to believe?


Emily Dickinson published less than a dozen of her nearly eighteen hundred poems during her lifetime.
Copyright © Terence George Craddock