For all your unwritten poems

This one has a stone wall that you saw
driving north at sunrise on your last day at work.
You thought, “I’ll write a poem about that”, but by sunset
it was lockdown again 
and you went home to stay home. No poem.

This one has a glimpse
you caught of your face reflected in a sunlit window
and your freckles surprised even you, as though
the last time you’d seen yourself you were pale
and now time and slowness had put their pigment on you.
You began – a sonnet, if I recall correct – but never
finished, the iambs too regular, life
in too much quiet disarray.

This one has ivy winding around it,
and this one got lost taking out the compost.
These ones were bundled together in your bed
when you fell asleep, and this one lies tangled
in your youngest son’s cot.
Over there’s an epic that was never thought
and under the garden path is a song.
“Remember us?” they cry, as you hang laundry to dry
and somewhere, yes somewhere, you’re sure that you do.

When it works,
when the sounds and pictures and words combine
to take shape on a page, on a screen, on a tongue,
you will look up, and find
the stone wall has become a city,
the compost heap an orchard, vast,
your children resting beneath the boughs.
You will stand 
on the bedrock of your unwritten thoughts,
teeming with miles of living humus beneath you,
everything being written, all the while.