Nestled in the Dollar Store bins, like broody hens,
with cheery Easter egg covers, slender spiral notebooks
that came all the way from China, begged for words in any language.
I was far from home, having forsaken notebook for computer long ago.
I forgot how much I loved the tactile sound of felt pen against paper,
purple ink carving out a highway of forgiveness on the pristine page.
My first strokes were hesitant, wobbly as a child on their first bicycle.
It’s been decades since I kept a journal. I, who was almost religious—
aside from an occasional skirmish with random scraps in classrooms,
or in the car while driving down the highway, small blank refuges
when nothing else would do. Those pages were broken wings,
orphaned thoughts hiding out in the most unlikely of piles.
They were buried in that precarious horizontal storage system
that threatens to engulf us all. But imagine my surprise
as I culled old teaching files to find nascent poems hidden deep
in manila folders, beneath old class lists and shards of student poems.
It was like finding buried treasure off a sunken reef of the past
with an impossibly blue sky guarding it with blankets of golden sunset.
Then, a night sky—was that the Southern Cross reflected on its surface?
Words waiting to combust off the pages into another life, unimagined.
6/9 Write On! with Terri Glass
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