Doing the Magical

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.

T.S. Eliot

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Carl Sandburg

Since I was a little girl, sitting cross-legged on a discarded carpet remnant, on the wood floor of my personal doghouse lending library, I have wanted to write, to be a writer, someone, who did the magical, the mysterious, who toured the world with the stroke of a pencil, then a pen, and then with ribbon and ink, and now with strokes on a keyboard. I have wanted to produce meaning, convey emotion, trade in the stuff of human beings, the things that make us, well, uniquely us. From time to time along the way, I have dabbled in poetry. I have tried on the form and found myself lacking there even more than with prose because if writing in general is magical, producing poetry then is sublime.

Putting words and phrases together
in a way not mundane,
is to hint at the
work of gods,
and demons,
because poetry is somehow
original stuff.
Birthed out of the ether,
before the things we know
existed:
before keyboards,
before ink and ribbons,
before pen and pencils,
before hieroglyphics.
Before language
there was poetry,
found deep in the heart
and even deeper in the soul.

slmoore

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