When you write a poem, something which was abstract in your mind - feelings, sensations, kaleidoscoping images - coalesces into something concrete. Words appear. You record them. You put them somewhere.
Once, they possessed you, but now you possess them and you have to work out what to do with them. You might share them. You might give them away. You might destroy them. You might just store them - in a notebook, on a scrap of paper, or as an electronic file….
You can also lose them, and then all you have is the possibly unreliable memory of the words of the things that you know once did happen in your head.
So I’ve had a busy few days. I drove 500km to our other home on an island in a river. I went hunting for an old storage drive containing work I wrote 20 years ago. There was a poem I knew I had written. A very simple poem. A love poem. A poem which tried to express, in just 6 words, why I love, and the process of that love.
Well I found the storage drive, but I couldn’t recover the poem, so I came back with my heart full, but empty handed.
And a few minutes ago I told Meg what I had been searching for and how I had wanted to put it here on Substack for the world (or my small group of Subscribers) to see. Sure, I could recreate it, but I wanted the original.
She just laughed - rummaged in a cupboard - pulled out a box of printed sheets and said - “everything you ever wrote for me is here!”
And sure enough I looked, and there it was…. so here it is:
In 6 words how I love her and why it never ends - as if my story above doesn’t tell you anyway.
PS. It’s partly an inside joke, because M was working in a QA job at the time, and drawing up endless complicated flow charts.
Beautiful as always 💗
Fully caught out publicly now!