Ordinary Magic

Why aren't there more poems about the mundane: the dishes,
the laundry, the picking up of toys and the making of the lunches
each night before school and work? Where are all the great
epics of housework, the odes to paying bills, the ballads
of the morning commute? Where is that ordinary magic?
I see it each time I bake bread, turn vegetables into soup,
wash grass stains from the knees of size three sweatpants.
But what is the invisible part of my day, that time spent in the
kitchen cleaning, or vacuuming the entire house, that doesn't end up in a poem? Isn't it my job to shed light on the ordinary magic of these things,
this time, my own sweat and work and daily grind: the driving, the
daycare, the job? I'm lost about it. Somehwere in the transformation of
dried, avacado-caked bowl into clean, ready-to-eat cereal bowl, I lose myself,
the very part of my imagination, or creativity, or attentiveness to the Universe, call it soul, call it whatever, call it POETRY! Whatever it is
I just lose my grip of it down the drain, into the garbage, back in the toybox, wherever the stuff and grime of my life needs to go in order to keep order, to keep me from writing poems. Yet I do write them. I find the time, middle of the night, to write it all down and call it a poem. I find the courage to call myself a poet, after working forty hours a week, and roasting chicken dinners to turn into lunches, and shopping, and cleaning, and laundry, and dishes, and vacuuming, and blah blah blah...I find myself writing, I find myself, in the midst of this ordinary magic--it's what I do to stay sane.