A Blessing

I rejoice in the poems not written:
the cruelly discarded: the crippled,
the asthmatic, the anemic: the poem

about a photograph: about what love
is like: about how strangely I
felt that day: about something about me,

noticed. Bless you, go on the ash-heap,
that fine compost from muscle, blood, bone,
which fuels surely the green slick stalk.

--Josephine Jacobsen

*

Is life not a hundred times too short for us to stifle ourselves?

--Friedrich Nietzsche