Writer’s Block: three poems by Stephanie E. Holden

stacking letters, image by David Peterson, on Pixabay

The Cherry Blossom Festival

Beneath these snowy boughs of fragrant flowers

Falling from blue into smooth-mirrored blue,

Thronging crowds weave and wile away the hours,

Their constant clamor striving to outdo

The chirping birds (which largely now have fled

In any case, befuddled and alarmed).

Odd scenes play out instead:

Pose, Click, Filter—then Spread.

And yet, behind the heavy hum, unharmed,

Soft-sighing music rises; a lone lark

Cries in hurried tones of a world unformed

Beyond the frivolity in the park;

Warm dappled sunlight dallies o’er the lawn;

And peace, quick blooming, slows my frantic heart.

Still, the dreaming day flies on—

Swift and pure as our first dawn.

I shall not stay to see the shadows start

To slither through the grass and gently slink

Around the trees; but though I must depart

(And though the flowers soon to fronds must sink),

I’ll keep quiescent springtime psalms alive

Within my soul—until new verdure bursts

Its seams and can contrive

For summer songs to thrive.

                               *

 Writer’s Block

With piercing swiftness, poems flare and fade:

Still-born in buds, branches, the roots of trees,

Smooth airy tendrils, wings, the green of leaves,

And yesterdays lost in eternal shade.

If brought to life, with zest they might have told

Of poignant joys or zealous quests

To slip away from sorrows numberless,

Or else of fruitless fantasies long cold—

These things and more, if I could give them birth,

Would populate new pages to be read;

But to what end, when it has all been said

Before by poets of both skill and worth?

It would not do to praise the nightingale

Once more, or seek, beyond the darkling deep,

Byzantium, with all her turrets steep;

They have been glorified, and fresh words fail.

Yet this blest world is ever brave and strange,

And each young age has trials it must face;

And therefore I may write new things, with grace, 

While old themes may be marvelously changed.

If I could catch, not the zeitgeist or time,

But Truth, and could transpose it into rhyme,

Then I should meet my Maker unafraid,

Presenting Him with stuff my talents made.

                                      *

 Building Blocks

My sister’s child and I just gladly spent

Ten days with building blocks on the den floor;

And in ten days, our blocks game underwent

A change, as her small dreams took fledgling flight

And she built “cities” for her dinosaur

(Dinosaur-topia’s the name that stuck);

And sometimes she would cry, with expectation,

“A tar! A tar!” (by which she meant a car),

And I would make a poor, unsteady thing

On which the dino’d perch until she struck

Out with her arms and sent it all a-tumbling.

My game, meanwhile, grew more precarious;

I built blocks like a modernist makes paintings—

Each piece half stacked upon the piece below

And half on air, until they looked quite ragged.

(She thought these worth tumbling too.)

But now we’ve gone our separate ways again,

The blocks abandoned till another time

When she’ll be older and have different dreams,

And we’ll build cities on some other themes.

In time she’ll also outgrow blocks entirely;

The den will soon revert to what it was—

A place where grown-ups chatter quietly

Of things of more mundanity (and less);

Her dreams will have a more substantial cast;

But life, like cities built of blocks, will still

Require a gentle touch and balanced skill

To keep it all a dream, and not a mess.

Stephanie Holden is an attorney living in the D.C. area; she has a B.A.

in Humanities from Yale and a J.D. from Columbia. She is writing a novel.

June 2025 issue