Draft to Publication 2

Some poems arrive fully formed. Some take a more circuitous route. My Found poems take time; from that first jumbling together of my own words and the words of poets and poems I love to making some sense from them. To make them say what I want them to say.

Even at their most metaphorical, they always express something about me, and are never entirely separate. I have to tread carefully, to not overwork and dilute. Sometimes, my final draft undergoes only the tiniest of changes before publication. Sometimes it's for the best, and sometimes I wish I'd left well alone.

Found Poem II from The Sublime & The Ridiculous came to my attention today. My final draft was:

You meet the weather
coming the other way.
I suffer the air.
It is more than love,

this fiery kiss.
This animal sunset.
Words grow in
my silent mouth.

Your stark eyes tell
of the hawk's violence.
The hare's blood.
The bones at the strand line.

And the published piece:

I now wish I'd kept 'Words grow in my silent mouth' as I think this is really what I wanted to say. How so very often you can't say what you want to. I changed 'eyes' to 'pupils' to make the piece more intimate -- to express how it feels to be so close to someone that you see not just their eyes, but the very centre of their eyes and all extreme emotion. The poems say it better than I do. That's why I write them. These poems are raw, and needed to be left. Some poems stand working over. Some just don't....