I joined a writing group recently and followed that up with some social media pages as well and keep being surprised by the encouragement to “tell us about you and your writing”. I am not sure why it would surprise me that other writers would ask about what I write, right? I think of myself primarily as a poet, and yet… When was the last time I wrote a poem? I can’t remember. That is terrible, not remembering my last poem, like forgetting your own children, that. I vividly remember the last poem I wrote before moving away from Wyoming in 1999. I remember the last poem I had published and that was shortly before moving back home to Wyoming in 2012. I don’t think I have written a poem at all since moving home to Wyoming. I haven’t written any stories either. I have written a few little paragraphs here and there, a few showing up here as moments to share. Can I still think of myself as a poet if I can’t find my last poem? It’s been three years since I wrote a short story or a drabble or even an email that consisted of more than a few sentence fragments. I really need to get back in the habit of writing, anything, for any reason. Thinking of being a poet and being one, these are not the same things, and I really feel the need to be a practicing poet again and not a past poet.

CHINOOK BLOWING IN

I taste whiskey

a hollow dust on my tongue

spirit of my father and

his father before

their roots in this soil

the blood in my own veins

this thunder that rocks

at my eardrums

memory I seek to preserve

even as it melts away

with the Spring snows.

S3 1999