Escape Hatches.
A writer has to get out of the way of a great poem.
It can barrel down your brain at three in the morning, announcing itself, demanding brashly that you wake up, pay attention.
It can arrive with less fanfare, creeping stealthily into a corner of your brain when least expected, while you’re on the expressway or in a fast food lineup, wholly intact, ready to deliver itself.
Some may be difficult to hold onto, like children running ahead of you in a playground. You can see them but they will not be corralled.
Others visit you fleetingly for but an instant, offering up a potent word, a loaded image, deftly uncovering a long forgotten moment.
They all ask the same, merely this: Take heed. Do it now. I am already planning my escape.
A sequence of my poems has been published in a hardcover book entitled The Music of Leaving Poems by Tricia McCallum