Limp Along Cassidy
A Jackpine Sonnet

My creativity lay crippled.
I picked up two fountain pens,
held one in each hand, a pair
of walking sticks or crutches,
but nothing happened.

My mind did not pick up its bed
and walk. My tongue tripped
between my teeth and refused
to move, let alone to talk the talk.

Reason and rhyme fled
from my head, and walked
a cross between a plank and
a frost crossed midnight road
of petty, lisping syllables that
struggled and limped and lost
themselves as they wandered
the labyrinth that wrapped
and mapped my empty head.

Comment:

Moo and I have both been on walkabout, absent without leave, wandering a deserted desert road filled with rocks and sand and not a glimpse of grass or a flower. Hour after hour, day after day, not a singe inspiring thought or brush stroke coming our way. We sat at the table, looking at an empty page of snow, with not a footprint upon it.

Why do these things happen? I don’t know. I have never worried about writer’s block, and Moo has never worried, to my knowledge, about painter’s block. The shock of the shadow of nothingness lay upon us both and even the coffee tasted differently.

Then, suddenly the dam broke. Moo painted five paintings in two days. I wrote four poems in that same time period. Suddenly, the silence lay broken, the plank had been walked, and we found ourselves safe on the other side of whatever it was that had come between us and our respective joys.

A dark night of the creative soul, perhaps. Luckily it was followed by a creative dawn. Light broke where no sun shone and suddenly those minds of our sparkled with creative gems once again. I reached out to Moo and we hugged each other. “It’s over,” we said. Then we changed ends and life and the grass was so much greener on the other side.

May it never happen again, we sighed. But I am sure it will. And I hope it never happens to one of you. If it does, just breathe deep, believe, examine the joys of that silent midnight, and wait for the dawn.