Meaning Weds Feeling

Am I a writer? Then burn from the sun
or shiver from icy cold
if my muse, intuition, flows forth about deserts
or icebergs and freezing snow.

I must be an immersive actor
so utterly lost in a role
that I’m Hamlet, Othello, Iago,
a prince, a soldier, a troll.

For it’s not information that penetrates souls,
it’s the invisible life in those words.
The emotion that animates stories,
if felt by the writer, goes into the words
as electricity lights up a bulb,
so you see me, you feel me, you sense who I am:
another you searching, for love, for belonging. 

Words are abstractions and just record
‘I love you’ from mind to mind.
But emotions are force-fields and recreate
the writer’s open, defenseless confession
that tears apart the reader’s heart
now equally vulnerable and open.

Still, the other half of the writing craft
is ‘le mot juste,’ for the meaning/emotion vibration.
Name must suit form, as clothing fits body,
sighs sound sad, or thunder feels threatening.

Then the right words, at the right time,
can stop a war or win a lover,
and those words may last forever.

Read Shelly today and feel once more
his aching longing for faraway freedom
as he gazed at his carefree Skylark.

Read Lincoln’s address and still, it’s alive
with his plea for equality and freedom
as he pondered the carnage before him.

As Shakespeare said, “…so long lives this,
and this gives life to thee.”

~ John