It’s Poetry Friday at The Well-Read Child, and I saw this poem in a children’s book and loved it…

“The Unwritten,” by W. S. Merwin:

Inside this pencil
crouch words that have never been written
never been spoken
never been taught

they’re hiding

they’re awake in there
dark in the dark
hearing us
but they won’t come out
not for love for time for fire…

Read the rest here.

I hardly ever write with a pencil. But I do sit at the computer, throwing out nets of words day after day in this blog. The perfect word escapes me, so I keep coming back. I’m half glad, half in agony over this.

If I wanted to think hard, I’d puzzle over the relationship between the words hiding in the dark of the pencil, and the incarnate Word saying, ”Let there be light!” I’d reflect that we replicate this world-creation on a smaller scale every time we sit down to write. I’d marvel at the inexhaustible supply of words in there, “even when the dark has worn away,” waiting to distinguish and name…

But I don’t feel like thinking hard.

I just feel like saying I love the poem, and love that it’s a treasure slipped into a book for children to discover.