The accusatory blank page stalks me.
Manifest in the form of a pristine notebook.
I long to speak, I long too create.
From my pocket, its nakedness mocks.

It whispers to my soul of stillborn reflection's.
I open it up to the universe of possibilities
and lose myself in the inordinate scale of existence.
I invert my view and look within, to understand myself.

The voices of Messer's Owen and Douglas
cry to me from their tortured past.
Poets that earned the write to be read
for no rewards but a cold field in France, years apart.

Echoes of hell broadcast through time.
Thoughts boiled in a cauldron fed by a lost generation.
A call to the future offering a warning
A taste of war with a bitterness that burns.

I pine, as my cosseted existence
holds none of the pain needed
to force a true understanding
of our human condition.

Then, in the corner of my mind I catch
Mr Hughes via the spirit of a fox,
he tells of the beauty in all.
Even the carefully sculptured Crow captivates and teaches.

No deep stares into the face of death,
but talk of its defeat, in life.
The vista around him, and the creatures within,
offer reflections on the light, and the dark, of existence.

Does the poet have to
take their soul and torture it,
rip it out and hold it
to the readers face for review.

Or is clarity of vision enough. The poet
takes up their weapon of choice,
the pen, carefully twists a moment around it
laying it gently, with the love of a parent, on the page.

As humble as it is
I have nothing to offer the reader
but a view of our world through my eyes.
I possess no other.

chris orton

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/where-is-my-tortured-past/