She Follows the Birds to Freedom

To Be Taken Seriously

Sometimes I feel like poets are not taken as seriously as they would like,
Our words are more judged as performance than rhyme,
A scheme of work of art and heart,
all mixed together with every part
of our hearts and souls and hope and dreams,
A testament to things
never being what they seem.
Our words are the only thing about us
that you can take seriously.
They clap and applause
and then smile and forget,
while we are the ones with all the pain
that is left,
They see us as actors in a play that we wrote, when the truth is we are just thankful to wake up in the morning.
That is how words feel, like life.
And to not have words,
to not feel this lightness,
to not have the aching hand
and a page to command,
is a death that is worse that death.
We do not perform,
we do not entertain,
our poems are the truths
that are happening in our brains.
Make no mistakes that this is what we live
and our words are the only thing
that we have left to give.
SK