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Dancing Words! Shubhra Krishan Shubhra Krishan is a television and print journalist from India, now based in Colorado Springs. Steeped from head to toe in the love of the English word, she is always writing poems and stories in her head. Firmly, passionately believes that "it's the life in your years that matters, and not the years in your life..."

My son is at the computer, writing a poem. I am watching a work of art in the making.

"There was a dog called Rocky," he writes.

I almost know his next line before it appears on the computer screen:

"And he loved to play hockey".

To him, writing a poem is really very simple: rhyme the next sentence with the last word of the first one. In the process, he sometimes comes up with beautiful lines. But that is secondary--the priority is rhyme.

Sometimes, when I feel I've written a really nice poem, I like to share it with him. His first reaction is: "But Mom, how is that a poem? Rock doesn't go with grass!"

And I smile.

When he grows up, he'll start writing poems like me. They'll pour out of his heart before he can help it. And most probably, they won't rhyme.

In that case, my son is bound to say, poetry writing should be the easiest thing in the world: just take a few sentences and scatter them across the page in a way that looks like poetry:

I went
Walking by the river
Of my thought
And found a lone dog called Rocky playing there.

Presto! You've got a poem. And who knows, someone might just find a huge chunk of meaning hidden there! Just like modern art that gets more talked about when its less understood.

There was a point when I had started to feel the same way. It seemed to me that just anyone who could hold a pen could write a poem. I found I was suddenly not enjoying poems at all. Before I could plunge into their meaning, the skeptic in me would raise an eyebrow and say: Huh! Another One of Those!

I picked up some books on the art of writing poetry. Just to see what the "experts" had to say. Should a poem always rhyme? What makes a good poem? Can poetry-writing be learnt? Should you revise your poem?

The experts seemed to differ on almost everything. And the question continued to grow in my head like a bubble.

Then, one day, surfing the net as usual, I came across these lines:

"I hate and I love.
Ask, if you wish,
Why this is so-
I can't say.
But I feel it
And I am in torment"

These were lines from someone's poem, but it struck me that they almost defined poetry. That was it, then. An almost artless flow of words, made naturally beautiful and picturesque by the purity of emotion. Rhyme or no rhyme, it did not matter. The touching rawness did. Through those simple lines, I had touched someone's soul. And someone had touched mine.

I remembered, then, lines from one of those "experts" I had read: Prose walks. Poetry dances.

Indeed. For some it's a waltz. For others, a close dance. Still others, like my little son, like to do a vigorous flamenco with their words. Whatever the steps, the dance is always delightful. I no longer question it. I just revel in it.

Until we connect again....

Credtis: Photo courtsey: http://www.proflowers.com

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