Just a bit of encouragement: every so often, go through the stacks, the piles, the shoals of unfinished work.

For me, that is always bits of paper with poems scribbled on them and then put into rough cairns to be re-found, often months later. What is somewhat funny to me is that the reason I stopped working on them at the time and left them in a pile is that I had dismissed them as “not much.” Such a terrible, damning way to think about one’s own child. Painful.

And yet, finding them again, I often see the original spark in them – the appreciation or elation or desire to magnify that set me writing or singing.

Here is one of those, discovered this morning as I cleaned out one of my studies (yes – I know that’s a little bit funny: ONE of my studies! I do love living in a house that offers all these perches and eyries for writing and thinking).

The photograph is the draft, written fast in my messy writing on the back of a gig set list.

So –
1. Clean out your eyries from time to time.
2. Revisit the unfinished; there may be treasure there.
3. Be kind to your creative children.

Here’s the finished poem:

Dressing Up

The first of April and someone
lifted more light out of the ancient
chest at the end of the bed

and flung it, laughing,
over the world’s shoulders

Lace atop the tossing waves
A hem of brightness
on the bare arms of the trees
A swung shimmer midflight
as the geese rise

It settles in silhouette
on your own body –
a blouse of glimmering silk

that heightens that family
look as though posing
in matched outfits
for a group photograph:

the whole world together,
people and creatures and places,
all wearing the year’s spring light

Kate Chadbourne
1 April/29 July 2019