To My Muse

By: Victoria Smith

 

Oh calm sublime,
oh sacred time:
How elusive you are
to this mortal scribe!
Might you appoint your
charms to bless,
this creator-soul’s
restlessness?

Poet’s Notes: Once again, it’s April—National Poetry Month. As a poet and author, I am regularly visited by what I call the “Great Restlessness”. I can’t adequately describe this apart from saying it’s like a regular haunting that brings about an amorphous sense of being “unhinged” somehow, of something only tenuously “joined” inside me that demands to be expressed in the written word in order to reach completeness or unity; otherwise, it refuses to release me. It’s a wonderful haunting, I might say, in that it can almost be likened as birth pains that have resulted in the creation of some of my best literary works.

Accordingly, it is the absence of this Great Restlessness that worries me the most. To not be driven by my Muse to create something is proof of a lack of inspiration, and that’s when I know I need to retreat from the world and regain my inner balance.

On this national poetry month, let’s take time to retreat from the world and read a poem or two. It could be good for the soul.

(Updates on Victoria G. Smith’s literary works and author events may be found in her website, VictoriaGSmith.com; on her Facebook page, Author Victoria G. Smith; and on Twitter @AuthorVGSmith. All her books may be availed of in the United States through her website, or individually also available on Amazon.com, BrainMillPress.com, BlackLawrencePress.com, Kindle, IBook, Barnes & Noble bookstores, and other major U.S. bookstores.)