Poem Written Inside My Head

By Marne Kilates

It needed to be written.
It wanted to be.
That’s a contest of verbs.
Half of me wanted to,
Half needed it to be,
It was a cosmic contest
Decided later by almighty me,
After I remarked the miracle
Of the mountain breeze,
The wind among the trees,
So novel to my jaded
Or ignorant ears numbed,
And deafened by the city.
What a wonder it was—
Like a hiker bouncing, balancing
On the rope-bridges above the trees—
Above the greed of land-grabbers
And quarries. What a wonder
It was to simply breathe,
To catch a whiff of bark or sap,
Or ground water, or the stream
And the curtaining rain
Not becoming a flood, but a whisper
Of the whirling spheres:
So the poem is written.
I rest as if on the seventh day.