The writing group dissolved.
I stopped writing
for 15 years.
I became a doctor of sorts
and conducted a business of helping others hear.
I would not hear my own heart calling.
I pushed down my stories, slammed the door shut
tossed the key in the weeds.
When the tidal wave of COVID hit the main land,
I found the Zen writing group.
I lifted a rusted key to a long-locked door to an infinite corridor,
where pickled songs and fairytales lived.
Some tumbled out, eager to see the light and taste the air again.
Some turned their owl eyes away from the darkness,
blinked in the glare of the opening,
uncertain if others would entertain their ugly splendor.
Other songs remain in cobwebs,
buried deep among the bricks,
waiting for a time before death to be revealed.
Some may stay silent.
Some stay afraid
The songs that tumble out, they take our hands.
They guide us to the poems that live on the earth:
to the little green grasshoppers that spring away from our footsteps,
in the long stripes of Bermuda grass that defy Texas drought,
to the striped spiders the size of a silver dollar sidestepping the drip of the watering cans.
There is a poem in the slide of horsehair across the violin strings,
in the furrowed foreheads of symphony players,
determined to boil the perfect spell of sound.
There is a poem in the scream of the child who has no words yet,
in their parents who frown, and sweat and embrace their uncertainty, their fear and their rage,
in the silence of the audio booth that holds them together
There is a poem in the paper wasp that licks a small castle
from nothing to something
in the space of 10 days
There is a poem in the chair painted pistachio.
Despite all its bumps and its scratches in its moving and time,
it resists a collapse,
stays upright and strong.
—Emily Romano
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