Mirage | A Poem

Foraging the real beneath the factual

The most scintillating piece of advice I gleaned from my university poetry professor was this: your poems, no matter how personal or evoked by reality, do not have to be factual. Perhaps the rug was, in reality, a forest green, but the poem begs it to be chartreuse. Allow the rug to sour; the poem is its own and gets the final say.

This motif has followed me through years of writing, compelling me to first tell what is most real within poetic frame rather than what is most actual. And as this motif has followed me in my craft, it has been unshakable in the rest of my being. The physical realm is full of actualities, but it teems even more with what is real.

I ask you this week, dear reader, to sense the real.