Poetry Friday - 4

My long Easter weekend was going to be spent solely in writing a long-planned and lengthy story accompanied by Classic FM's annual "Hall of Fame" countdown, but alas work has intervened so I shall be working on another half-completed story. Nevertheless, I thought that I would share this poem by Howard Nemerov:

Writing

The cursive crawl, the squared-off characters
these by themselves delight, even without
a meaning, in a foreign language, in
Chinese, for instance, or when skaters curve
all day across the lake, scoring their white
records in ice. Being intelligible,
these winding ways with their audacities
and delicate hesitations, they become
miraculous, so intimately, out there
at the pen’s point or brush’s tip, do world
and spirit wed.


The full text of the poem is here.

When I write straight into a word processor, rather than longhand in a notebook, I find myself missing the physical act of writing and the way the words seem to flow through my hand and out of my pen. These lines of Nemerov's capture that fascination that I have with the physics of writing longhand, and I particularly like the comparison with skating.

This week's Poetry Friday round up is hosted over at Wild Rose Reader.