By Maria Padhila
I’m going to start things out with this, because I think we could all use something that could make us laugh about now. I know I could.
Sometimes, when I organize poetry readings, I give out cookies — because otherwise, there wouldn’t be much of an audience. I like to invite people who aren’t so well known to read, and on top of that, poetry can never count on having much of an audience. It’s one of the reasons I get discouraged creatively, and start wondering why I should bother.
I’ve had times when I could write a poem or more a day, but lately it’s taken more than a week to even begin something. It’s a combination of lack of time and that encroaching sense of “why bother?” I’m having a lot of 12th house/Neptune/Pisces/Chiron action, and Saturn in the 5th, and it weighs one down. But in my soupy way I’ve been stirring around over a poem, and it’s made me think hard about jealousy — a certain kind of jealousy, because that quality has so many masks. The phrase “dog in the manger” was the original — I won’t say inspiration — but the germ, that might be a good word, for the poem.
This phrase comes from the fable about the dog who, though he himself couldn’t eat the horse’s food, didn’t want the horse to get it, either. He lay in the manger and barked to keep any of the other animals away.