\Back to Poetry\
What Does Your Soul Know? *
Judith Deem Dupree
What can it say perfectly,
without stumbling or seizing up
in clumsily deciphering itself?
I am fraught with all the ills
of borrowed language-
that self-imposed jurisdiction
of the acceptable, the useful.
A genial kind of babble, a glib
that trips the tongue, that
stutters it like something foreign.
But I begin to practice carefully,
rehearsing not the words,
but how they happen-exploring
what they shape from what
I do not know beneath them.
Like Demosthenes, mouth full
of pebbles, I cheek my smallish
thoughts and speak between,
around them, gargling back
for something truer, craving
deeper-whatever wants to tell
what it was born of.
* From a comment made by film writer
Barbara Nicolosi at a workshop:
"Don't write 'what you know';
write what your soul knows."
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