After Writing, After Frost By Sally Zakariya

After Writing, After Frost
      But I am done with apple picking now. – Robert Frost
 
Because the winter ground is hard and bare,
because I can’t think how to say the things
I want, or say the things that should be said,
because the spring is late again this year,
I rest my pen across the empty page
and look to gather words that have been spread
across the fallow field of memory
to salvage failures worn and bruised and pale
to store up for a rhyme some other day,
for I am done with poem writing now
and put it all aside until the sun
can warm the earth, and coax a bloom or two
from the bare bush that grows beside the door,
and usher in a spring of poetry.

 Sally Zakariya’s poetry has appeared in some 75 print and online journals and been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Her most recent publication is Muslim Wife (Blue Lyra Press, 2019). She is also the author of The Unknowable Mystery of Other People, Personal Astronomy, When You Escape, Insectomania, and Arithmetic and other verses, as well as the editor of a poetry anthology, Joys of the Table. Zakariya blogs at www.butdoesitrhyme.com.