Day 9: Practice What You Preach

I looked at yesterday's blog. Live fearless I said. Take chances. Expand your creative horizons. Not the exact words but you get the point. Well, it's time to take my own advice and live fearless.

I spend most of my writing time with a mystery at the present time but my first love from a creative point of view is poetry and will probably always be poetry. I love the images one can create in a few words and how the emotions of what you are writing about is right there on the surface, in the flesh for everyone to see. Nothing hidden. The truth written for all to see. So at the end of this post I am going to put up one of my longer works in draft. I wrote it during a poetry class I took in the fall. The thing about my poetry is that I have no idea whether it is good, bad, or indifferent. I guess I really should not care as it is a question for me as an artist whether I like it. Apparently I do and I was happy that to create it. Not perfect yet. Certainly not ready for publication but I have to remember what is the purpose of this blog: to examine my creative process and to facilitate your reflection on yours. So if I hide my work because I am afraid of its rejection or failures as a piece then I am a complete hypocrite in what I write. That's not who I am so I give you an excerpt from a poem with the working title 'The Wasteland.' (My apologies to Eliot). This is all I have written at this point but I will add over the coming months.

Excerpt from “The Wasteland”  

We stand

One by one

One hundred by one hundred

Thousands by thousands

A million strong

As sure as it is one

We are the lost, the incomplete

We are the teachers,

Doctors, electricians, chemists, and vets

The builders, miners, hunters and fishers

The architects, inventors, foresters, and farmers

Painters, sculptors, composers,

Poets, philosophers, and saints

Slain before our time

Our gifts unperfected

Connected, we search for our peace

But find none, for

We are beset by our regret

Tormented by our truths

We have seen the blood of many

But the blood of none stains our souls

We are valour, duty, and courage

But we are these things in vain

Pawns, sacrifices for the corrupted

But not for the good of our mothers,

Our sisters, brothers, wives, sons and daughters

Nor for our neighbours or our friends

We have died on soil unknown to our feet

We have died in battles unrelated to our hearts

We are the dead

We are your comrades in arms

Taken in our prime

Memories only to those we loved

And who loved us at home and afar.

While he is old school I take a lot of influence from Whitman in some of my work. Always open to comments about what you think about the work