Would you ask a violinist “How much do you practice?”
or a ballerina about her grueling daily dance routine?
Everybody writes. The poet writes like she prays, with passion.
Athena emerged fully-grown from the head of Zeus.
She saw everything and knew everything.
To be born, the writer enters a state of curiosity,
waiting for the moment when
the poem opens up and tells her
what it wants to be about.
No thrills of discovery for the goddess.
Miles Davis said, “My future
starts when I wake up every morning.”
Author’s Note: (First published in lexpomo.com, a month-long poetry blog in Lexington, Kentucky.)
Gaby Bedetti hikes, takes photos, plants trees, and sings in several choirs. After grad school, where she co-founded the University of Iowa Museum Bulletin, she started teaching at Eastern Kentucky University. She co-teaches Page-to-Stage: Imagining the Military Experience in Iraq. She married a guy she met at a literature conference in Louisville, and together they raised a couple of kids. Her work has appeared in such journals as Off the Coast, Italian Americana, Poet Lore, and New Literary History. She has written a poem every day in June for the past four years for her town’s poetry blog, lexpomo.com.
A Quiet Courage 