Spring by Noah Shachar

When spring comes to a white meadow,

I cannot choose where the flowers grow.

Nor the direction the grass will go,

Once spring winds blow

In this white meadow.

O Lord how I brace against the flow,

Again and again I struggle so.

Each time I am reminded,

O so brutally and slow.

When will the flowers bloom?

Only God knows.

This is one of the first poems I wrote after getting back into the writing game. I had been reading a lot of Robert Frost and there’s a lot of his influence in the piece. The poem itself only took maybe an hour to write, but the creative process involved at least a week of mental flagellation. I found the most difficult part of writing this piece (and for anything I create) was the beginning. Actually sitting down to write and putting myself in a creative headspace is often the most difficult thing to do, especially when I wrote “Spring.” Overcoming the fear associated with a blank page and the, at times, overwhelming sense of possibilities is always the first step for me. I can think of infinite reasons to not write (my favorite reason is, “eh, fuck it.”) but that rationale does not behoove an active writer. A writer must write, at least more than every once in awhile. Not everything needs to be perfect, in fact most of my work never sees the light of day, but it takes practice and perseverance to let the creative juices flow.

For me, after writing those first few lines (or the first stanza or two in a longer poem) I found more ideas coming to me, a sort of diarrhea of the mind. The task was then to weed out the good ones from the bunk ones. In the case of this piece I set up a couple of factors to help me decide on the ideas I wanted to keep–the image of a snowy meadow and the rhyme. Getting the syntax to flow with the rhyme in the first few lines really sets the rhythm for the entire poem. From there it’s just a matter of writing to the rhythm, which is difficult in its own regard, but it helps me to decide against words that don’t fit within the context of the poem, such as words with too many syllables and filler words, as well as force me to pinpoint words that are very descriptive to highlight multiple themes. In addition, keeping the images focused on a white meadow prevents the piece from becoming cluttered. Rather than exploring all the aspects of spring and winter, I could focus on this particular situation and not get lost in the metaphors (the sauce).

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