by Nancy Scott
A friend recently asked
if I thought of myself
as an expert editor or writer.
I laughed. I am a plodder.
Everything takes at least ten drafts
and much of it makes me wonder
if I’ve learned anything.
I have practices of long necessity,
advice taken to heart and keyboard
and patterns my ears always hear.
And I have the long, obnoxious bio
but I wasn’t published until after turning thirty.
I pack Braille poems for a bookstore open mic.
One hour of metaphor motivation
and I want to go back
for a future reading of Noble Quills.
I will don my beyond midlife crisis shoes
and an outfit likely too old
in safe neutral colors.
I’ve been writing longer
than many of these creative minds
have been alive.
I might be an expert in survival.
This youth craves energetic
images that inherit exclusion.
There is chai and several young poets who,
when I announce this poem as new,
will chorus on cue, “new stuff.”
I will cut, move, and choose
just to make them chant.
Expertise? Desperation? Fun?
At seventy or seventeen,
we all want this hope —
to find ourselves,
to find our tribe,
to word-will a room.