To Get a Poem
(5 Quadrilles)
Leave the dirty dishes in the sink.
A dishwasher washes the poems away.
Allow cat hair to accumulate on the footstool.
Cat hair is a city for poems.
Let plants go another day before watering,
lest poems in the soil should be flushed away.
Let lie the crumpled sock a friend’s child
left in the sleeping loft.
Don’t destroy the poem of it.
Don’t bother to rake leaves.
Poems cannot live in neat piles.
Leave the soupstain on your shirt .
Tomato and basil are ingredients of poetry.
There is a poem in the confetti of paper on the bedroom carpet
and in the bread crumbs and the orphaned straight pins.
Bills in the “TO BE PAID” folder?
Each is the embryo of a poem.
Paying them now would be poetry murder.
In my living room, there is more poetry
in the blankets of dust on glass tables
than the burnished surface of the clay vase.
There is more poetry, more poetry, more poetry
than can ever be tidied up in this world or the next.
Falling poetry snarls in the weave of the hammock.
All of this raw poetry lies around us, primed for the collecting.
Messy poetry and dusty.
You won’t die from, but you could live on
poetry that’s hidden in the messy corners of your world.
For dVerse Poets. The prompt was to write a quadrille on the subject of poetry.
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 
Judy, yes, we were thinking alike – we are living on the poems in those messy corners today 🙂
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Only time for doing so much. A girl might as well write poetry.
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It’s cool how you wrote each stanza as a quadrille. Good idea!
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It was a poem I wrote years ago. I took lines from throughout and composed the quadrilles. Fun to do.. and it made me cull. I love these little poetry puzzles. Thanks for your kind words.
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Love it! For me it would be titled, “To Get a Photo”.
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Wonderful! One of my big obstacle to writing has been my perfectionism that wants to take care of all those messy things but to see the poetry in them and, more importantly, to just let them go so as to have time to write–I will take this as my permission! Thanks for joining, Judy.
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My favorite quote is “If everything’s important, nothing’s important,” by Patrick Lencioni. I’ve constantly reminded myself of this truth since I first heard it in my twenties.
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Love this – was just thinking today how we poets are a messy bunch, lol.
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This is absolutely brilliant and amusing at the same time.
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Thanks, Jacqueline.. And now you have an excuse not to do all those daily boring housekeeping tasks! Write on.
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I liked the delay in cleaning up the poetry and this line: “All of this raw poetry lies around us, primed for the collecting.”
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Actually, just a bunch of excuses to write instead of clean house and go sweep the deck! Ha!
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