20,000 words

toward the stars

each year, as autumn moves toward winter,

I pull together a collection of my poems 

from the last 12 months,

sort and organize them by category:



what comes out of my world as a teacher,

a grandfather, a sojourner in nature,

a muser upon revelations that want to reveal themselves,

my computer word processing program,

besides red-flagging what it sees as spelling mistakes

(and which usually are, thought the wordsmith in me

views words as more elastic than the program),

that program also counts my words,

and last year’s collection of poems tallied

over 20,000 bricks of words in my constructions toward the stars,

whatever the path toward meaning we can find

is worth us traveling it.

by Henry H. Walker

March 1, ’14