‘In Need of Saying’

In Need of Saying

by Douglas John Imbrogno

Seen from a high hilltop, the
lake in the distance, surrounded by
a plush-green shag rug of forest,

looks like a puddle. No house,
no road in sight. Only
the clouds, passing in

sequence, bifurcated by
sky’s blue, have anything
at all to explain.

+ + +

I am on a porch, captain
of a green ocean. Wasps patrol
the boundary lands. In

whispering winds, conversing
in high tulip poplars, I hear
poems from another tongue

I can’t decode. Yet whose
murmur and metre
echo in some native

quantum tongue
only my cells
will understand.

+ + +

The things most in need
of saying come to me when
I am far from pen & paper,

in quarter-lotus
communion with grass
and forested detachment.

Seem less like bromide,
more like sutra. To be lived.
Not commemorated & preserved.


march21.2022 | re-worked 2006 journal entry