The poem surfaced in a waking dream, most certainly because I had just finished a series of poems entitled A Band of Angels, Hovering. Always, it is the images in flight and the sounds they make that catches my eye and my ear. And because I am always thinking oh here it is another composition that wants music to make its way directly to the heart without any thing in the way. And because I always want to ’trust your language, take a risk, and make a poem’, this is what I set out to do. Then, I compose the poem image by image, rhythmic constellations following each other in a space to settle down. After every three or four lines, or strophes or ’turnings’ in the original Greek, I say aloud these lines at the same time ticking where the voice lands, thus hearing the all important rhythm that’s being established.

Here it is then how language moves through time, which establishes the tempo and colour that my language makes in search of what’s being discovered. And what’s being discovered, usually after ten or so versions, becomes the poem that says what it is to say about becoming one-with-the-poem. And I am always rehearsing how it is that one word after another word, image and sound, flies to each other because naturally they need to. And always in the process of scoring the poem I circle those instances of rhyme, half-rhyme, slant rhyme and the like, including any cluster of spondees which delivers maximum eye-and-ear energy and focus, viz ‘two chairs, one’ (you can hear the three beats of the spondee), and ’so now I write it myself’ (four beats as the poem comes to its end).

I focus on these details because it is the sound of sense a poem makes.