The sun was sparkling over my head as I reached for my rod and my reel

A walk down the path of my sleepy-eyed mind, accompanied by thoughts of a meal

I sat on log, that had lain there for years, on a spot that was barren of moss

And quietly thought of my choices, of the color of lure I should toss

The beams of the sun played through leaves in the breeze, dappled dots chased themselves by the stream

Hypnotizing my eyes with their fast-paced display, my mind drifted into a dream

The rod now a pen dripping ink from its tip; the lure an eyed gem floating free

Stream’s water replaced with the flow of my thoughts, forming eddies around sunken tree

Asleep or awake, I could not really tell, perceptions seemed focused and sharp

Yet my body felt light as the smoke from a pipe as it wound through the strings of a harp

Sentences fell on blank sheets by the shore, as I watched the words form on the page

My vantage point now like the eye of a hawk, as I drifted above this grand stage

As I read the fresh ink, now cohesive and tight, it would seem quite a masterful piece

The rhyme and the meter were perfectly matched, my mind sought a well-timed release

How could it occur that my words became art with no need for my thinking at all

I’d have to remember each stanza and line, and each detail which I could recall

Concentration seemed totally futile, the words blurred before melting away

My memory’s grasp slipping quickly, as I tried to coax verses to stay.

I felt myself falling, quite slowly at first, away from that work of perfection

Now just chaff on the floor of mind’s threshing room, no way to make verse’s selection

Like grasping at straws in a tornado’s winds, my mind sought to hold onto words

But the closer I looked, what remained of the ink, now resembled the scratching of birds

I landed quite hard, atop mossy log, sitting still near the stream but awake

Lamenting the loss of a poem never written of a stream in the woods by a lake.

By James Geehring

From: United States

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