what words come willing?
which must be coaxed with tiny crumbs of food,chocolate & small promises?
which words must be dragged in screaming?
I’m still thinking about words and how they are influenced by what I’ve read, seen on television, heard on the street etc. Today the word stoic jumped into my head as I was thinking of another word to describe the naked trees piled on the logging truck (an image I had used in a poem in progress). This thought came to me because a logging truck went by triggering the memory of that poem and so on.
I always thought of “stoic” as a kind of “stiff upper lip, grin and bear it kind of being”. I looked it up on dictionary.com and it’s even stiffer: of or pertaining to the school of philosophy founded by Zeno, who taught that people should be free from passion, unmoved by joy or grief, and submit without complaint to unavoidable necessity.
In a way, I guess that’s what the trees were doing but I don’t ever want to be stoic. Can a poet even get close to that state and still be a poet?