Free the Muse – Cage the Critic
You will see a lot more activity on this blog in the coming year. I will be posting a new poem here every morning.
I hope you will join me on this quest to free the creative muse and cage the internal critic.
Linda Studley
Can't Put the Pen Down…
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Linda Studley
Linda Studley is a writer, songwriter, independent recording artist, and sometime graphic artist living in Northern BC, Canada
Linda Studley 
You recently discussed poem-anagrams, and I mentioned the fact that I’d anagrammed Kipling’s ‘Mandalay’ into an alternative poem. I won’t bore you with it here (!) but I would like to share, if I may, an anagram that I created from the classic eulogy poem ‘Do Not Stand At My Grave and Weep’. I won’t make a habit of plagueing you with my anagrams but this one is quite special to me as, after it was printed in the Daily Mail (a UK daily newspaper) I received numerous letters and emails from Mail readers saying how it had moved them. Writing free verse does not come easily to me but when I am creating an anagram of an existing poem, the self-imposed constraint of only having certain letters avaliable to me throws up ideas and areas of creativity that would never have occurred to me. All my ‘poemagrams’ are run through a computerised anagram-checking program to ensure they are authentic anagrams. I hope you don’t mind me sharing this with you, and if this is not the forum for doing so then I apologise.
The original poem appears first followed by my anagrammed poem (after the = sign) By the way, i do not specialise in somber stuff, I do write humorous verse as well!
Do not stand at my grave and weep,
I am not there I do not sleep,
I am a thousand winds that blow,
I am the diamond glints on snow,
I am the sun on ripened grain,
I am the gentle autumn rain,
When you awaken in the morning’s hush
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circled flight,
I am the soft stars that shine at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry,
I am not there; I did not die.
=
The sunlight hits your photograph
And memories stir and start to dance,
I let the quietness linger then,
The moment fades, but not the pain
That hides within, it’s undiminishing,
A format never finishing,
Distained and flat, a stone-hard fact…
Now, as rain drums on my window pane,
A dormant mind-light glows again,
And I believe I can make it through;
You’d want me to.
You’d want me to.