Letting Them Crawl

Today's poem was accepted for publication only a couple of years after my first acceptance ... my "lucky poem" ... "Chance of Rain."

I was so intrigued by the writing process.

Oh, I had written things along the way ... homework, themes for English class ... I even wrote sports items for my hometown newspaper when I was in high school ... wrote letters when I was in military service ...

I knew how to put words together to make sentences, sentences to make paragraphs ... but the process of sitting down with no idea of what I was going to write ... letting the words, the ideas, present themselves to me ... putting them on paper and discovering that they made sense ... that's what intrigued me.

It was still a new experience when this poem was written. I was lucky to have had it ... and several other poems ... accepted, over time, for publication in ByLine Magazine.

I still write quite a lot about writing ... not that I'm an expert ... far from it ... but because the process still intrigues me so.

It's still like magic to me when the words come together, seemingly of their own accord, to tell some sort of story that has a certain feeling to it, some of the flavor of music, perhaps, or the makings of a poem.

Today's effort:

LETTING THEM CRAWL

These words I write
are the embers
of a fire that has
smoldered far longer
than I had imagined
it would. How much
longer the sparks
will race among
the cooling ashes
of my past, I have
no way of knowing,
but I intend
to give them air,
let them crawl
as long as they will
on this journey
toward becoming
something that has
the sound of poetry.
© 1996
(originally published in ByLine)

Today's word: embers