People talk about writer’s block
– about being over-faced
by the blank page
but to sit down with a blank page
and pick up your pen is to
dive into the liminal space
through the portal of the page
breaking the smooth surface
making a splash
wearing the threads
of previous thoughts
oft rehearsed but still
essentially, feeling naked
We swam in the waters of
Mahon harbour on a night when
the little side bay was filled
with phosphorescence
took a hand full of water and
slowly released it back into the main
and in our hands
and in the falling water
individual creatures gave forth a
tiny burst of light.
but swimming through their midst
the lights coalesced
into a ghostly glow around our bodies
all semblance of individual
creatures, words or events
subsumed into the glow
Later rowing our cockleshell boat
we traced our path with
pools of light left in our wake
where the oars had dipped in
and disturbed the
creatures distributed
in the depth beneath
motion was transformed into light
pale radium green, glowing
under the Mediterranean sky
– and to think
these motions are
always present
the glow – the pools of
light even when we can’t
see them – blinded by
the greater light of day.
The light of luminescence lives
in my mind as a memory
fixed by processes
still unfathomable to
the very minds that
try to comprehend
– axons and nuclei
and who knows what
– as ungraspable as those tiny
light-emitting creatures
like words on a page they
appear unpredictably
have their moment
and disappear into
the stream of time
into the past
as we authors swim
across the portal
climb out on the
other side of the pool
and only then
turn and look at
the patches of
light we have left in our wake
astounded at the
words filling the blank page…
© Andrew Wilson, 2024
Tonight is Open Link Night over at dVerse Poets Pub and msjadeli is our hostess. I wrote this in my AWA writing group a few weeks ago and it seems to follow on from my post before last – contemplating the process of poesie…
