Every Poem Was a Secret
Every poem was a secret
struggle with himself,
every secret was a struggle,
a handwritten scrawl,
something joyous
or terrible,
a fragmentary
blood-soaked message
wrenched out of his body,
a longing for
some impossible harmony
tucked into a bottle
and tossed off the side of a cliff.
Reckless love poems, shocked elegies
drafted against death
looking for God–
some of them shattered
in desperation
on the rocks below,
but others, like this one,
bobbed away
on surging blue waves
for someone to find them.
~ Edward Hirsch