Hello poetry, where have you been?
When as a child in a row of pastel desks
With stubby pencils and long paper sheets
Where we learned the paste from the scissors
You were there.

Loosely gathered into a discovery corps
We turned pages in tiny-finger worn books
And alternated voicing two or three lines.
With us who hoped the teacher would allot just one more
You were there.

When we waded through chest-deep angst
To spend hours tracing sidelong glances
Or the smoke-trails of our tiny flaming arrows gone astray.
Across chasms of the first decade of life in double-digits
You were there.

As we interwove whispers and fingers
Biases, peeves and favoured paths.
When we constructed habits and routines
Built of the fibres and sinews of our hopes and needs
You were there.

Hello poetry.
Like a ticket carried inside a woolen mitten,
Or words coalescing during a savoured conversation –
Sun-warmed pebbles discovered along the beach.
In our ears,
Our thoughts,
Our songs.