8.12.22

Thầy writes in Stepping Into Freedom: "Do not become a book." 

It stopped my writing, quietly in the night. I looked at my hands, my feet, my desk. 
The moon, outside. 

Recently, I've been trying to write as if my poems were trees in a forest.
The ancestors of books. The wind blowing through them, and an imagined solitude. 

And if not a book, what should I become?

The people pressed into the pages.
Who were they before I turned them into words?