For the young who want to

A poem by Marge Piercy

Talent is what they say
you have after the novel
is published and favorably
reviewed. Beforehand what
you have is a tedious
delusion, a hobby like knitting.

Work is what you have done
after the play is produced
and the audience claps.
Before that friends keep asking
when you are planning to go
out and get a job.

Genius is what they know you
had after the third volume
of remarkable poems. Earlier
they accuse you of withdrawing,
ask why you don't have a baby,
call you a bum.

The reason people want M.F.A.'s,
take workshops with fancy names
when all you can really
learn is a few techniques,
typing instructions and some-
body else's mannerisms

is that every artist lacks
a license to hang on the wall
like your optician, your vet
proving you may be a clumsy sadist
whose fillings fall into the stew
but you're certified a dentist.

The real writer is one
who really writes. Talent
is an invention like phlogiston
after the fact of fire.
Work is its own cure. You have to
like it better than being loved.

Copyright 1980, Middlemarsh, Inc.
from THE MOON IS ALWAYS FEMALE
Alfred A. Knopf, New York

Fair-Weather Prayer by Stacey Haas

We looked like angels
in our hospital gowns,
waiting on doctors like fathers
to save us from ourselves.

Wanting to be freed
from whatever encrypted disease
was our genetic destiny,
we put faith in a savior
to change it.

We sat on bended knee
with bated breath for a savant
in a white coveted coat to come,
but he's in and he's out
in a matter of minutes,
while we're left with a feeling
like we missed it.

We get the pills without a problem
like a script without a story,
scrawled in hurried cursive
we weren't meant to understand.

This is treatment without reason
leaving half the time
not knowing what is wrong.

When confronting
the unmendable by medicine
we're taught to pray for miracles,
to trust in the invisible
as if death were avoidable.

But the truth is we've collected a debt
and nothing is owed us but a bed
of worm turned earth to go to.
Does that scare you?

The dividing cancer cell is not evil
rather, so adept at it's own growth
it forgets the confines of it's host.

Humans should understand that the most.
Think of everything we've outgrown;
toys, countries, taxes, kings.

When reminded of mortality
we make a steeple of our hands
and whisper promises
we will not keep.