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blunderbusswriter

The Poem You Were Planning on Writing

Updated: Aug 7, 2023

Figuring out how to create this blog has taken way more time than I anticipated. I tried a couple different blog-making platforms, but wasn’t happy with the look and, sad to say, the domain-name hosting I.P. jargon confused the heck out of me. I thought a previous blog attempt was live, but it turns out it wasn’t, and my frustration was wearing thin. (I’m not a Luddite, but maybe Luddite-adjacent because I have an inkling of what I don’t know.) Anyway, yesterday morning I had two thoughts. One, I remembered that on a jog last year I’d been stopped in my tracks by the spectacle of a flock of starlings sweeping across the horizon, making mind-blowing patterns. I’d taken pictures and made a video. Yesterday, I thought: wouldn’t it be nice to post that video to my new blog? My second thought: why not try Wix as a website design platform and start from scratch? I’d heard Wix advertised on podcasts that I love. In fact, didn’t they usually give a promo code? So I selected a podcast that I suspected would promote Wix: Debbie Millman’s “Design Matters," and I started the most recent, unplayed episode. And this is what came out, in the voice of the poet Sarah Kay:


The universe has already written the poem you were planning on writing

And this is why you can do nothing but point

At the flock of starlings whose bodies rise and fall in inherited choreography

Swarming the sky in a sweeping curtain that for one blistering moment forms the unmistakeable shape of a giant bird

Flapping against the sky

It is why your mouth forms an “oh” that is not a gasp but rather the beginning of “oh, of course”…


As I reeled with the dizzying synchronicity, my mouth held its “oh” while Sarah Kay completed her breath-taking poem and Debbie Millman came on with her theme music and a pitch for Wix, just as I’d hoped she would.


Of course.

And this is why you can do nothing but point.



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