The heat’s too hot
The cold’s too cool
No middle ground
To stand on
I choose one side
Or straddle both
The conflict
Still conflicted
Or is this like
The parable
Of glass half full
Or empty
The trick is not
To see the half
That is or is
Not empty
There is water
In the glass
Perhaps enough
Or plenty
The trick to think
Outside the box
Is to see there
Is no box
Always
The nature of a conflict
Is the nature of conflict
Itself
Hope Slide
Nicolum Valley
Cascade Mountains
British Columbia, Canada
Taken during travels, 2016
Yes, this is the same image which inspired my post Campfire. It’s just turned 90 degrees clockwise here.
Rather, this is the original image, in its original orientation, which had inspired this poem’s first stanza and the first two lines of the second… and then stopped. It had no where else to go, at least none that I could hear in the words at the time, so I set it aside.
I’d briefly turned the image, as I was looking for inspiration from it before writing any lines at all, to the vertical, but hadn’t ‘seen’ anything in it at the time…
…Until sometime after I’d set this aside and moved onto another image entirely. The vertical image came back into my mind as I was thinking of something else, and with it the single word, ‘Fire’. Which seemed an obvious enough allusion to the contents of the vertical format.
It didn’t take but a little exploratory word listening to find “Campfire” in that, and the poem flowed pretty quickly from there.
I haven’t posted anything yet today. And, for some reason, I wasn’t interested in scanning through my catalog of images looking for inspiration. Instead, I landed on this barely begun exploration of what was originally titled, “Hot & Cold”.
In the interim, I had put a bit of effort into a facebook discussion of the historical development of the AR-15 semi-automatic combat rifle, which of course lead to a discussion about gun control. So, the meta-theme of conflict and conflict resolution was heavy on my mind.
Hot and cold. No middle ground. Conflict. Now I had somewhere to run with the words already started, which remain in their original form.
Pix to Words 