I might as yet have been a spreading flower

Had poetry been offered me in youth

For verse doth bless, nurture – empower;

With it I should’st not have been uncouth.

But here I stand, a yob, I have no culture.

My speech is limited and bears no fruit,

I am as wordless as an ugly vulture,

An uncommunicative and simple brute.

Oh to fly on words like outspread wings,

To speak those words that hover shy and tame

But trapped they are, and never shall they sing,

Through life I’ll drift, a misfit, lost, lame.

But could I twin one shy word with another?

And could that one in turn offer its palm?

To tentatively touch its nervous brother

Until a line stood, trembling, arm in arm?

And from that line another could be born –

Words heard and held in secret in my mind.

Now from my heart a million words are torn

A word for every feeling I can find.

And suddenly I am a spreading flower

A seed on which the rain has fallen sweet

Every word remembered gives me power

And each one gives me wings beneath my feet.