I am a poet and I love the words,
the way they pattern music in the mind.
I love the images that they create,
the subtle trace of sound they leave behind.
I love the way that they embroider thought,
the way they weave ideas in a text,
and how they lead the reader through a maze,
predicting where the thread may guide them next.
I love the way they play in realms of feeling
and somehow seem to orchestrate the soul.
I love the way, like cells, they seem to gather,
accumulating to a greater whole.
How could we live our lives without a language?
What are we but the things we feel and think?
What are we but the mesh of all our meanings,
beyond necessities of food and drink?
I sometimes fancy words can conjure magic,
that poetry coheres to speak a spell,
that language lets us live ourselves a story
and gives us each a cogent tale to tell.
I wonder whether back before existence,
just as incipient being slowly stirred,
the earliest, subtlest trace of any matter
was but anticipation of a word.