Some Times

As an aspiring writer, I am often in awe of the sheer volume of words established writers are able to amass.  How do they do it? I wonder as I struggle to fill only a few pages of my journal or type a thousand words of a short story - and that on a productive day of writing for me.  Other days I manage only a few disjointed lines of prose in the margins of my grocery list. 

 

But don't all writers begin their work with a single word? And that word with a single letter? Or even just a dot where their writing implement first touches paper?  What springs forth may become a masterpiece, or it might be wadded up and thrown in the fireplace to catch a spark and become a temporary flash of heat. 

 

Be patient with the process, I tell myself.  Trust your words as they come, I remind myself.  Write a little or a lot, but write, dammit, so I make myself.  And I read, read, read, everything from the large bodies of work by writers I love, to the few short lines shared on social media by friends I adore.  And sometimes, in the mixture of all this reading and thinking, something of substance is formed and my words are released like vapor. 

 

So it was today, after I put down Elizabeth Gilbert's "The Signature of All Things" and picked up my iPod to check my Facebook feed, that a poem was born.  An amassing of words at the intersection of Moss Time and Screen Time which I'll call . . .

 

Some Times

 

Sometimes we are the waves

battering the shore.

Sometimes we are the shore

rising up for another licking.

 

Sometimes we are the stream

filling an empty depression.

Sometimes we are the depression

needing to be filled.

 

Sometimes we are the pond,

stagnant with green algae.

Sometimes we are the algae,

growing despite stagnancy.

 

Sometimes we are the boulder,

impossible to budge.

Sometimes we are the moss,

breaking the boulder with patience.