At our last poetry writing support group for caregivers, caregiver Bob shared the following poem:
I Began to Write
I began to write because I was angry.
I began to write because I was hurt.
I began to write because I needed to vent.
I began to write because Fran could not.
But along the way an epiphany.
I fell in love, I fell in love with words.
I find joy in finding the right word and
Like a jigsaw puzzle only one word will fit.
I love the richness and simplicity of the right word.
It has elegance and beauty in its own right.
I love the harmony of words together
With meaning greater than the sum of its parts.
I see stories unfolding to make you weep.
To laugh and move you to action.
This is the power of words.
©Bob Oyafuso
Bob confessed how he pondered over each word and of the time spent
searching for the right word. “It’ll take me 35 years to write a book,” he laughed. He explained so well the process of writing poetry.
Driving home, I thought of …
It took me years of reflecting and over six months of actual writing to write the following poem. When the episode happened, ( I was a young new teacher, I noticed a first grader missing…I panicked and went outside and saw him running across the playground with arms all out…running into the fog. I stood and watched him until he returned; he merely said “I couldn’t touch it.” We walked back to class without a word, my arms around his shoulders.)
I knew I had to capture it so I wrote a short story.
Somehow the story just didn’t do it. I wrote the story in various forms and finally settled on the following:
Run, Run, But Not Into the Fog
A little boy
Runs into the fog
As it slowly creeps
Over the field,
Softening edges
Into mists.
He runs and runs
And soon is swallowed
By the mysterious giant.
Then slowly, quietly
He returns to me
With wooden legs
And puddled wings.
“The more I ran
The more it disappeared.”
from The path of Butterflies.
No one ever said writing is easy.
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