On Not Writing My Novel by Hylda Sims

On Not Writing My Novel

I get up, puzzle on a little poem

I eat a bowl of yoghurt, wash my clothes

then fetch the post, and make the bed, too late

by now, I think, for getting down to prose

which can't be dreamed up in the bath; deadlines

is what I need - exactly what I've got

dead lines, espaliered, rootless, black on white

to rearrange in miles of well-turned plot

all bedded in and diligently pruned

with every branchlet tensioned on a string;

meanwhile the sturdy poem grows and blooms,

self-watering, an independent thing

not much to do but turn it to the sun,

its stems will straighten up, its petals sing

Hylda Sims, Sayling the Babel (London: Hearing Eye, 2006), 67.