For a while, I haven’t written. I wondered why.  Nothing seemed compelling enough to write about.  OK, actually no ideas were coming at all.

Rilke wrote in Letters to a Young Poet,  “Go into yourself. Search for the reason that bids you write…ask yourself…must I write?”

Elizabeth Gilbert in Big Magic, writes, “Ideas are a disembodied, energetic life-form…driven by a single impulse: to be made manifest. And the only way an idea can be made manifest in our world is through collaboration with a human partner.”  p. 64  She goes on to say, you can say “no” when an idea comes, but it will move on to someone else.

So I waited, trying to be alert to what might offer itself  to me. One morning, the words started to come.  I understood, at least for me, my writing.  And, I started letting it happen.

WRITING
You write where you are
Not where you are forever,
Just where you are
in this nanosecond.

To give voice to the words
that comes through you.
Traveling fast, as if sent
urgently from a distant place.

The ones that pay a surprise visit
as you’re about to fall asleep; the ones
urging you to write them down, to
hold them to a page so they can’t fly off.

Sometimes you think them
too bold for print, you fear
what others might say.
Still, you write the words.

A understanding, a phrase…
not for forever, just for right now
for this nanosecond
for this poem.

besliter, January, 2017