✨ Poets

I carried across the ocean ...

Poets

     We are busy doing nothing.

          —Billy Collins

I’m busy cherishing the warmth
from my coffee mug this morning,
the one I carried across the ocean
from John Keats’s house in London.
My palms cup the words
painted with the opening
draft of his timeless
nightingale ode, words crossed out,
and I can’t discern what came before drowsy—
My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains—
his penmanship is two centuries old
after all; two whole centuries ago he drowsed
for hours on a brilliant May morning
under the plum tree in the front garden,
while inspiration garbed itself
in the bodies of birds
and invisible molecules of ordinary air.

—Andrea Potos

✨ This poem is in honor of Take Your Poet to Work Day!

“Poets” is from Her Joy Becomes. Copyright © 2022 by Andrea Potos. Used by permission of Fernwood Press. All rights reserved. www.fernwoodpress.com. Photo by frank mckenna, via Unsplash.