Let There Be

The page stares back at me
its emptiness more presence 
than absence.

The pen hesitates—
or maybe it’s just waiting for me.
An occasional flicker of
something that dissolves 
when I look too closely.

Words in my mind,
scatter like dust,
like sand in the wind.

I can’t see.
I press harder,
demanding sense,
demanding beauty,
demanding anything to fill the space.

Perhaps the struggle
is the poem itself. 
It will not be forced.

I’m left with the weight of trying,
the ache of creation,
the intense insistence
that something will emerge,
even if it doesn’t.