Wordsmith Provocateur

A poet's unspoken oath binds tongue to wonder,

ear to the tremor beneath language,

heart to the stubborn, shining truth

hidden inside a single word.

The task is simple.

The task is endless.

For to lift the reader is akin

To a magic carpet lifting the child in all of us,

rising above the fences of certainty.

Drifting across unmapped skies,

is to confront unfamiliar thoughts

taking root like wild seeds

in soil no one knew was fertile.

The poet is a prospector in a gold rush of language,

waist-deep in the cold river of speech,

hands raw from sifting through mountains of syllables.

Most pass through the fingers:

Gritty words,

Sandy sentences,

broken stone paragraphs.

Yet now and then,

a glint.

A flash beneath the current.

Something catches a beam of light

and refuses to let go.

The poet plunges deeper,

fingernails packed with the dark earth

of unfinished thought,

and lifts a word-vein from the riverbed,

heavy with possibility.

A word may arrive

dull as an uncut stone,

cloaked in the mud of abstraction.

The work begins there.

We turn it.

Hold it to the light.

Strike away the excess.

Polish edge after edge until meaning gleams

from its hidden facets

and throws bright shards of reflection

into another soul.

How long the hunt for the one exact word,

the metaphor that cracks open silence

like a pickaxe striking quartz,

the simile that sends sparks

skittering through forgotten chambers of memory.

Sentence by sentence,

the poet tunnels deeper,

following faint traces of ore through caverns of uncertainty,

guided only by instinct, wonder,

and the distant gleam of discovery.

Then comes the moment.

The buried treasure breaks free.

The right words lock together with the clean, ringing sound

of stone finding stone,

of key meeting lock,

of flint birthing fire.

A stanza suddenly breathes.

A page begins to glow.

The reader sees something never seen before,

or sees the familiar as if for the very first time.

For that moment,the poet remains a nomad

crossing the wilderness of language,

following flickers on far horizons,

sleeping beneath constellations of unfinished poems,

always chasing the next bright signal

rising from the dark.

Not for gold.

Not for praise.

But for the miraculous instant when a handful of words

becomes a flame of light,

a compass,

a bridge,

a treasure map

pressed into the waiting hands

of another traveler.