A Secret Salvation
I wrote this in 2010 after a firm decision to pursue the poet’s vocation.
It still applies on this Monday’s morning – and we have another new pup.
Perhaps it can act as a rededication. 
A Secret Salvation Monday morning wet in the window-framed garden, a new pup asleep on my shoulder, her nose on my thoughts, as I tap away on a laptop, iPod playing, the would be poet. Debussy hovers over the keyboard as I try to craft honest lines. I open the window and my thoughts fly up to the dark peak and the snake’s pass, where Kinder Scout receives the clouds’ grace with limestone joy. Watering the valley where my house perches as a heron rises, spreading his wings over the ruined works where men ground iron. The pup stirs, the track changes, the swan’s lake trembles, violins then a single oboe sweeps a curved neck’s slender whiteness towards the city, where horns blare at the commuters. Meanwhile, in my writer’s basement the music ends, leaving silence brushed with the edges of birdsong. Now audible, the clock marks time and motion, the grafter’s mockery of the slow writer. Poets – what use are they when so many grapple with the hard world? But poetry is a pension fund against the stealthy shadow, waking you in the dark demanding, ‘What are you here for?’ So in that same darkness I pull myself apart and in this morning attempt to give form to things unspeakable, to record the speckles of birdsong, with a poet’s faith that this Monday morning has a secret salvation – if only I could write it.
Poem from The Call of the Unwritten – Adrian on Amazon – Photo copyright Adrian G R Scott