1. First, forget that you want to write a poem. Because maybe you don’t. But you’ve got a blank page or too-bright screen in front of you, aching for you to put something on it.
1b. Just set down some words, gently, as if you’re placing a delicate china cup onto its equally fragile saucer. Let them come through your fingers, any words you like the sound of. Maybe chimney. Or plucky. Or plucky chimney. They don’t have to logically go together. Let yourself smile at their willingness to show up for you.
2. Add more words. Arrange them in short lines if that looks good to you, little stairsteps marching down the page. Try not to think too hard about them, these raindrops of syllables trickling through you, these sturdy words: Mediterranean. Catalpa.
2b. Or maybe your lines stretch across the page like the long arm of a wave coming in parallel to the shore. Watch it arrive, melt into foam. Call it a prose poem, if you want.
3. You may think, This is a poem? It’s a poem if you call it a poem. Doesn’t matter if anyone else thinks so. Or praises it in any way. It’s your poem, dammit.
3b. Keep going till the poem wants to end. How do you know it’s the beginning of the end? Put an ear to the words; listen closely as if trying to determine if someone is still breathing. Listen to the words inhaling and exhaling, living on the page, stairsteps leading to some final thought, becoming something that didn’t exist before you started.
4. Resist the tendency to dismiss what has appeared from who knows where with (look at that!) a bit of fairy dust sprinkled on top. Honestly, it’s magic; no one understands how this happens. Admire what has tumbled down those stairs and landed.
4b. There. You poemed just now. That is no small thing, my friend. You poemed.
(in honor of Live Long and Prosper Day, Leonard Nimoy’s birthday)
We think Star Trek, but Jews know that it’s the gesture for the Hebrew letter Shin, the first letter of the word Shalom.
And the man who created it, who parted the fingers of his right hand for the rest of his life in salutation, knew that it calls for healthy and prosperity—
live long and prosper.
People don’t realize they’re blessing each other with this, said the Jewish man who gave the world Spock.
That we are hardwired to love and lose is what comes again and again— the euphoria of spring springing into sudden, bright leaves where there were none days ago, green harbingers that will age through summer, grow brittle by fall.
It is the way of things:
That decline into the time when passage to the next place is possible, mourning what was, learning to let go.
That love emerges in the form of unexpected beings who appear, lend a hand, a heart, a word, companion spirits, seen and unseen, who arrive with armfuls of compassion,
kindness falling like soft rain after a long dry spell, moistening hard ground, coaxing out of hiding green stalks topped with dancers in fluted yellow skirts to courtesy in the breeze.
Three young men showed up not long after 8 a.m. ready to carefully trim the old sycamore, its caretaker a bit trepidatious about what Braden, the climber, might decide to remove.
It’s a heritage tree, the estimator said, which means that they take extreme care with the old girl— no chainsawing, just long-handled pole cutting here and there,
there and here, on a day of chilly mizzle. Braden, the sculptor, dangling from the rope high in the sycamore like an orangutan hanging by a long arm, taking his time, surveying, removing what isn’t needed—
wielding the chisel not unlike Michelangelo, young at his craft but evidencing a good eye, moving through the century-old limbs like the pro he is, at a vantage point I envy, one I’ll never see—
while groundsmen Austin and Max apply chainsaw and rake to a couple of volunteers, one of which has died, beneath the great tree.
They are artists and barbers, surgeons and coroners, as well as those who tidy up after the messy business of disposing of death, of tending the living who, after the team’s good work, will, the tree gods willing, continue to rise tall and strong.
Güd wrtr 