To Be or Not To Be

Lea Moore

To be a poet, you have to play God. Be the composer guiding the emotions.

To be a poet, you have to calculate the importance of each word. Not a syllable left untouched.

To be a poet, you have to paint with white space. Love the possibility of emptiness.

To be a poet, you have to speak with imagery. Nothing is what it seems.

But I don’t want to play the Creator. Can you imagine that kind of pressure?

And I don’t want to calculate every sound. (I don’t know that many words).

And I don’t want to paint in the negative. That blanket freezes my message.

And I don’t want to speak through nature. I am not a leaf.

Someone once told me poetry is meaning without a story. But stories are how I communicate.

So here I go.