Just Saying

It’s not just a cup of tea,
it’s fragrant steam
from a porcelain bowl,
leaves inside blossoming outside.

It’s not just a breath of air,
it’s hundreds of years
of leaves and latewood,
Earth’s redemption.

It’s not just the sea,
it’s immeasurable depths
and creatures as mysterious
as aliens somewhere in space.

It’s not just poetry,
it’s time scrunched into a ball
and smoothed out again,
words emerging from the creases.

Kim M. Russell, 28th February 2024

Image by Steve Johnson on Unsplash

Sherry is hosting What’s Going ON? this week with a lovely poem to inspire us. It’s called ‘The Only Way I Know to Love the World’ by Julia Fehrenbacher at www.juliafehrenbacher.com.

Sherry says that she was very taken with this poem, which is ‘a good example of how the simplest thing can inspire us to think bigger: from a cup of tea or coffee to loving the whole world’.

She would like us to write whatever comes to us from the prompt or the poem, and says that repeating a line or phrase is one cool way to make a poem cohesive, and it’s sort of a call and response that works really well in the example poem.

Also linked to the dVerse Poets Pub Open Link Night on Leap Day 2024.

73 thoughts on “Just Saying”

  1. I Love this poem, Kim. Each stanza is just perfect. I especially love poetry scrunched into a ball and smoothed out again, as wondrous a description of poetry as I have ever heard. A delight.

    Liked by 1 person

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  15. Kim your poem evoked images for me. A shovel digging, a dolphin leaping through waves, a poet sipping tea on the moon. Love the repetition which pulls the reader into each stanza with fresh focus.

    Liked by 1 person

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  17. Hey Kim, You must be so pleased with this. The way you work through your theme through each stanzas different focus works so perfectly. So well fashioned and, abive all, true. So altogether quite a poetic triumph

    Liked by 1 person

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  23. Yes, all those little, not so little things! Every stanza is beautiful and almost stands alone, but I especially like
    “it’s time scrunched into a ball
    and smoothed out again,
    words emerging from the creases.”

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

  24. I love your deeper definitions here, especially the last stanza on poetry, it’s such a lovely analogy. And just love how the tea, the air and the sea, accompany the act of poem-making to make this a full complete moment for us to share 🙂

    Liked by 1 person

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  35. Pingback: Poems from the Circle – It is not just… | flashlight batteries – Ali Grimshaw

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