What Will I Say?

The outcry of a distraught poet.

What will I say when gathered snow
Falls upon my gravestone there?
What triumphs will I have to show?
What will remain when I’m below?
When I have died and passed along
The things I knew in prose and song,
If I’m unhappy when I’m gone,
Where will all my sadness go?

I find the stress too much, I say.
It takes me out of happy life.
The pages of my life are gray,
And every hour I’m led astray
By another thought, another whim,
To capture—quick! before it dims!—
As if I have a hundred limbs
To bottle butterflies all day.

A novel here, a novel there…
“What’s one more on the docket?”
Short stories, poems, all is fair!
Yet somedays all I do is stare.
Vanity of vanities, I think it went.
But my ruthless need! I cannot relent!
Still all my energy is spent
Being spread as thin as air.

Today it’s this, tomorrow that.
“All this buttoning and unbuttoning.”
I’d trade my guts for all I lack:
A pound of flesh to stay on track.
Is mediocrity the only end?
A sordid life, a downward trend?
Can God’s fine needle hope to mend
A hopeless man, a sorry hack?

Each day I forget just how to write
The way I did when I was young,
As if that way was guiding light,
As if it fills me with delight
To read all my old amateur words,
No prose, no depth, just all absurd.
Half-baked YA trash for birds—
But when I wrote it, it was right.

If it was right, I have, I fear,
Forgotten what it means to play,
To enjoy the work I love so dear,
And hold my writing close and near.
At last I must confess, you see,
A rarely admitted vanity—
To leave my mark on Eternity
So all who pass know I was here.