Dead Songs & Sacred Gardens ~ A Poem on Creative process

Sometimes, creation hurts. Sometimes it burns, dries up, refuses to come out. This is a poem about that silence. That grief. And the flowers that follow.

This is the first poem in a new series of raw writings I’ll be sharing from time to time - fragments of inner life, grief turned soil, songs buried and reborn.

Creative Death and Blooming

Sometimes, the creative process is so painful.
I have all these incredible visions inside me,
and sometimes they just won’t come out.
I can’t do it.

It rumbles, it screams inside me,
like a baby that won’t be born,
and I die in childbirth.

I’ve died in childbirth a thousand times,
crawling belly-down on the Earth,
begging Her, for it to come out, or to end.

I feel the anxiety of death,
the surge of life,
the spark that’s about to go out.

My mouth is full of ash.
I am dry. Burned-out.
A scorched old tree.

I am the heatwave,
the lightning,
and the frost.

I suffer in silence,
watching my fingers on the blank canvas.
I swallowed my song, and now it sits, undigested.

And my hands write words soaked in sorrow.
They celebrate my pain.
They transform it.
And my dead song is honored.

I am a cemetery,
watered with my own tears.
And from that sacred source,
the plants and flowers of my inner garden,
will grow, soon.

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Thank you for reading. If this moved something in you, you can receive these poems directly in your inbox, quietly, sometimes.

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All words and images © Julie Austin, unless otherwise noted.
These poems are part of my personal creative and emotional journey.
Please do not copy, or use them without permission.
If you'd like to share, kindly link back to this page and credit my work.