People often ask me,
as if they care,
where poems derive.

I care and have
given it much thought
for decades.

It is a hard
and genuine question
that deserves
an answer.

I believe poems
come from a spring.

They begin as
the slightest trickle
beneath a mossy boulder
on a steep, green
Tennessee ridge
that manifests as a run,
a river, many rivers
until it flows into
the Gulf Stream.

The spring
is a place on earth
where something
begins.

The spring is not
the water.

I am the poet.
I am that spring.

But I am not the poems.

The poems are the water,

they flow,  
seeking something larger

than I can hope to be.

~mce