Poems are often products of a low patch, a. k. a. depression. Sometimes writing, especially poetry, helps me to be more objective about whatever it is I'm struggling through, because of the objectivity that necessarily goes into the crafting of a poem. And the more I write, the more I distance myself, not from the problem itself, but the negativity it generates. So I don't think of such poems as depressing in themselves, but as a purgation.
The Ideal
I've heard it said that only the ideal
Carved out of want or spun from fractured dreams
Can lift the soul, and render what is real
Exalted, loftier than what it seems.
This may be so; but then, what of the pain
Which never having touched the height has wrought?
What of the reaching time and time again,
To end in losing sight of what was sought?
I had imagined once, in simpler days,
That loving in itself was absolute;
I could not see, so upward was my gaze,
The price exacted by this high pursuit:
Exalting what is obdurately real
While sinking with the weight of an ideal.
© Leticia Austria 2008
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