"Waterfall at Lu Shan," by Li Bai

 Link to poem Waterfall at Lu Shan

We, the Scribblers

Pencil, pen, typewriter, or

device--it's al scribbling.
Poets scribble. They worry

words like squirrels
spinning chestnuts
in their paws, like spiders

dancing on filaments
they've spun. From Li Bai
stumbling through the Chinese

mountains to a right-now
middle-school girl or boy
in Tehran or Kansas,

to an old man or woman
in Costa Rica or the Ivory Coast,
everywhere poets find a page,

an opening, a little place,
in which to scratch words
they know that seem to push

themselves out, hauling
ideas and emotions with them
from some underground mind,

some sense of things
in the gut or the chest,
some wildness amid the

planks and bricks of conformity.

hans ostrom 2023