Gravitas

All poems begin with hope, if in starts and stops.
Completion moves
from silence to voiced approval.

Words bunch themselves into clusters.
or words may break
apart like pearls on a string
or a bag of marbles.

Ear mends and sets the breaks,
provides direction.

Yet, nothing we can say
stays quite the same.
Life itself
is divided into factions
and there are distractions.

A bent poem must be re-broken
and some lines fall,
unfathered and unspoken
beyond recall.

If that’s not all,
there is of death and strong emotion.
These, too, must be built in
or a poem will fail.