Draft Process: In Our Time of Trial, Our Wounds Resisted

55º ~ spring storms have settled in, gully washing away the morning, all gray and wet


Well, praise be!  My hope from Thursday materialized, and I did find time this morning to draft a new poem.  There's not a lot to tell about today's process that is new.  I sat with my journal and a book and a little instrumental music on soft, soft, soft.  I had my cup of coffee.  I listened to it rain.  I caught hold of a line from the book I was reading and thought I had a beginning.

After scratching through some hard-won lines, I feared that maybe I was pushing this angry sisters thing too much.  Maybe they only had a handful of poems in them.  Maybe I've grown addicted to the idea of a persona leading me through an entire book. 

Then, I remembered that earlier Eduardo Corral had put out a call for favorite words on his Facebook page, hoping to use some of those words given to him by others in a draft of his own.  My word was "cauterize."  Remembering it snapped today's draft into focus.  I confess there's a bit of fever in it (ah, you sickly speaker, haunting, haunting).  The angry sisters seem to also have a thread of burning/fire/ashes underlying many of the drafts so far. 

Oh, I forgot.  Before I started drafting today, I read over last week's draft and realized that I had to cut an entire stanza, which contained one of my favorite phrases.  Guess what?  Most of that stanza worked to make the last stanza of today's draft.  This rarely happens for me.  In this case, I kept trying to use that left-over stanza as a beginning, and then gradually realized that it had to be the end.  Again, I rarely begin working on a poem knowing the ending, but there you go. 

As for the title, it began as the first line at some point in the draft, and when I realized that I needed to add a bit of information to the first stanza, something had to give.  Cutting the first line created an instant title. 

In the end, I'm still not sure about the angry sisters and if I'm pigeon-holing myself or forcing too much, but I do know that April looks to be an insane month and I'm happy to have this draft in case I'm derailed for the next few weeks.