Oh, how I love new discoveries, and this week’s discovery for me is the wonderful poetry written by Janet Frame. A dear old friend gave me a copy of Janet Frame’s “Storms Will Tell” and I fell in love instantly, and today’s poem of the day is Frame’s “How I began Writing”

1

Between myself and the pine trees on the hill

Thoughts passed, like presents. Unwrapping them, I found

words that I, not trees, knew and could afford:

lonely, sigh, night. the pines had given me

my seven-year self, but kept their own meaning in the sky.

Now, in exchange of dreams with this remote world

I still unwrap, identify the presents;

and always tired recognition gives way to hope

that soon I may find a new, a birthday shape,

a seperate essence yielded without threat or deciet,

a truthful vocabulary of what is and is not.

2

Vowels turn like wheels; the chariot is empty.

Tall burning consonants light the deserted street.

Unwrapping the world,

unwrapping the world

where pine trees still say lonely, sigh, night, and refuses,

refuse, and their needles of deciet drop in my eyes,