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
