There are many things I’d like to have explored with you today, but this has not turned out to be — for me — a good week for that kind of journey of heart, head, or hands. My old habits are urging me to provide you with plausible explanations & profuse apologies but, instead, I will offer this poem — written for a class several years ago:

I CANNOT WRITE THIS POEM BECAUSE...

I cannot write this poem because
the witch who lives at the top of the stairs
will not give permission for me to speak.
Silence, she hisses.  Stop.
Be still or you'll wake 
the dragon who slumbers below.

And what are poems but dragon dreams
of soaring wings over desert wastes
whose sands have buried a thousand worlds,
or of deepest dive through salty light
to labyrinth cave where treasure gleams
with wink and promise of what might be?

No.
I cannot write
for witch forbids
and dragon sleeps
and, in any case,
the child
has hidden 
all my pens.

“What poetry knows, or what it strives to know, is the dancing at the heart of being.”

–Robert Bringhurst