Poetree: Overcoming “Writer’s Orb”

For weeks I was stuck inside a writer’s orb. Commonly mistaken as a “writer’s block,” this writer’s orb was even more discomfiting. It was round – it was all around me. Whereas a writer’s block has distinct edges and sides marking the lines between your boundless creativity and a lack thereof, a writer’s orb is hard to distinguish most of the time, and harder to solve. Defining the circumference of its constraints in an attempt to solve mental confabulation is a tedious and uncertain venture.

Writers tend to overcomplicate most writer’s blocks (or orbs, in my case). They sit upon the same old blank paper and think the same old blank thoughts. Breaking free from writers block, as in this case, is sometimes as simple as reading the works of other authors. For me, as I sat down to write about a rose (this was as far as I’d planned), I decided on a whim to emulate the rhyme scheme of Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” For those unaquainted with this classic poem, let me share the beginning:

Whose woods these are I think I know.   
His house is in the village though;   
He will not see me stopping here   
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

– “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost

To make a short story shorter, I was intrigued by the rhyme scheme, having, myself, rarely executed an AABA rhyme scheme, so I created one about a rose. Yeah, yeah, there’s a lot of deeper meaning to it, and the rose is just a symbol, and there’s a ton of metaphor, blah blah blah. Don’t worry about all that. Here it is:

What beckons me from endless sleep,
When I am caught in slumber deep?
What power summons me awake,
When soft away doth silence creep?

What orphic spell around me flows,
Enfolds my being from head to toe?
What substance had my transient doom,
That, back to it, I’d ever go?

When clutcheth, I, this thorn-lined stem
The lights shine bright that were once dim,
The sun says “night be ever gone,”
As it jumps ‘round horizon’s rim.

Somehow this rose so strange and red
Appeared to me while I, in bed,
Dreamed of it in another world
At once did cease that pang of dread.

When picketh, I, that flower bright,
For soft and lov’ly was this sight,
It’s thorn did prick, my finger bled
My mind spun fast, from left to right.

I woke up in a pale haze
A temporal and well-lit daze,
A moon that I had never seen
Held fast my non-expiring gaze.

That’s it for now! As always, thanks again for stopping by, and be sure to check out my previous post!