Poetry In The Early Morning Hours, with Leslie Soule

Hello there everyone! My name is Leslie Soule. Well, I like to write poetry. But usually I’m so busy working and writing other things and reading and just generally getting stuff done, to be able to let the muse come to me so I can write any poems.

Well, recently I had to take the day off so I could get LASIK done on my eyes, which meant that I got to sleep in. I was nervous, so I went to bed really early the day before. When I woke up, it was early in the morning – the time I would usually be getting ready for work. It was then that I realized that I missed something – the feel of writing in the early hours of the morning – a time that J.M. Coetzee writes is “the time of morning when even the chickens doze – and the only emperor is the sun.”

When I worked retail, I would write at this time of morning on scraps of receipt tape as I huddled outside in the garden center, next to a tiny box heater on the counter. I never thought I’d miss that. But when I woke up the other day, the muse came to me and urged me to write. So I just started writing whatever I could think of. My poems are usually in first-person, like a journal entry. My critique partner says I’m a natural at first-person, and I’ve started experimenting more with it lately. Anyway, here’s what I came up with:

A Memory

In the peacebreak morning hours

I linger like a memory

Wondering if you’ll remember me

Don’t you realize that my eyes

Hid behind spectacles as I watched you go?

It was your blue eyes that made me remember

I knew I’d seen you before

If only in passing

And maybe that’s all love really is –

Fleeting glimpses of somethings

You cannot touch

Blond-haired dream, if only my mind could conjure you up

But it’s not the same

Somewhere between imagination and actuation is where fulfillment lives

But I’m a doorknob-ditch kind of girl

And Old Man Reality carries a cane

And knows how to use it.

So anyway, I captured a piece of something I’ve missed for a while – writing in the early morning hours.

~*~

Leslie Soule is the author of the upcoming fantasy novel Fallenwood from Decadent Publishing, and has published shorts and poetry. Leslie hails from California, enjoys martial arts, and is currently working on her MA in English. Please visit her website, and learn more about Fallenwood here.