Janet Lynn Davis

How to prune a poet

I'm not prolific.
To get more lines from me
you'd have to prune me first—
grab your hand shears,
cut my creaking, errant excess out.

But do it right, at the right times,
never in winter,
during my hibernation.
Trim me with a cultivator's touch,
after languishing me with water,
nourishing me, tending my petals
as if you were in love.

Don't hack, how brutal.
You could leave wounds
that would never heal.
I could become infected;
then I'd lower my limbs
in a defeated poet's stupor.
And at the most, I'd write of throbs,
an egregious injury
the likes of which you,
grimy gloved, would never feel.