It is late winter in my country, South Africa, and the poem on that subject (imaginatively titled “A Late Winter Morning”) is developing slower than expected. It seems to me I have not yet shaped its stanzas to my satisfaction—they contain my impressions of the season, but have not the internal coherence I desire in my work.

Then there are the time-consuming experiments of expression the poet must make—however confident of his lines he may be—for from those may come a thought, word, phrase or line that ignites his composition. Should he be successful, more time must be spent to actualise his discovery in the existing work—often, transforming it completely!

Presently, I am at the end of just such an explorative phase which has resulted in two compositional directions: the first with two stanzas, the second, three (in both cases, with several variations), that I must now attempt to refine. From whatever comes as a result, I shall ultimately choose a draft to develop into a final work.

“A Pear Tree” is complete, and I have moved to the next sketch, “A Late Winter Morning” (originally “A Partly Cloudy Morning”). Outlined in a rough stanza eleven days after the original “A Pear Tree” sketch, it describes the countryside at sunrise as it appeared to me upon an August morning in 2018.

Incidentally, I have reverted the titles of two finished poems to my original choices: “A Walk II” (wherein I remember my first Great Dane) is once again “You and I, My Hound!”, which necessitated the removal of the Roman numeral from “A Walk I” (wherein I remember my late friend, Jacques F. Visser).