Today’s Poet’s Corner contribution by Valerie Volk is about being a writer and the unreliable source of words.

Writing My Days

On a good day
words come gushing
from a tap,
as if too long shut off.
At first they’re rusted water,
then it clears,
contenting streams continue.

On a fair day
words drip reluctantly,
but cannot be shut off.
Incessant, maddening,
still they come.
No denying this faint trickle.
It eats into my consciousness.

On a poor day
I wait in vain.
Sometimes I tap reluctant iron,
refusing to believe it’s empty.
In desperation wrench the outlet,
wanting just some sign of life,
some hint that springs may be renewed
and living waters come once more.
But nothing happens.
Blank pages wait.

Valerie Volk is a former teacher, lecturer and education program director. Her award-winning poetry and short stories have appeared widely in journals and anthologies and her first collection of poems “In Due Season”, 2009, won the Omega CALEB Prize for Poetry. Since then her prolific output has resulted in three verse novels: “A Promise of Peaches”, “Even Grimmer Tales”, and “Passion Play”. Her new book, the prose work “Bystanders” is due for publication next year.

Readers’ original and unpublished poems of up to 40 lines can be emailed, with postal address, to [email protected]. A poetry book will be awarded to each contributor.