Call this a poem if you dare

Dance, words, dance! Pick a melody and a rhythm and fly across the page like a seagull so high all we register is the squawk and the rattle of the redwing’s challenge here below — Mine! Mine! All I survey belongs to me, it is mine and no other, and I share it with you from the goodness of my very special heart.

Fly, words, fly! All of space and time belong to you; even when the words aren’t sufficient to speak the beauty, there are words to describe when words fail, those awestruck moments when there’s nothing to say except there’s nothing to say.

A picture may show more than a thousand words can say, but the words can say what the picture cannot, the picture only shows what is, the words show what it feels like. The words say why they feel like dancing and flying.

I am frozen in time like that moment a half-century ago when I taught myself how to play someone else’s song and I made the music that came out of the radio using my own fingers — I am frozen in time like that moment I held a girl’s hand for the first time — I am frozen in time like that moment my lips touched another pair of lips and I knew why they say it’s electric because I felt the shock of recognition — another human touching me touching you and we are together literally and figuratively we fit together like we were designed to do this.

I am frozen in time, only my fingers moving slowly across the page scrawling words that are between my ears (some of them, anyway, the ones I remember long enough to write them down) and shouting across time to a moment when someone sees the words and hears my voice inside their head except it’s my words and their voice or their imperfect recollection of the timber of my voice approximating.

I am frozen in time and maybe in years to come I will remember the evergreen behind the naked branches behind the vehicles that passed on the highway behind the old highway behind the rocking chair on the porch on the other side of the window next to the stairs to the basement behind the bookcase with the dinosaur Mary gave me across the room behind the open door to the room where I am sitting frozen in time.

It is twelve minutes past three on Tuesday, April 14,2026, and I have frozen the moment here on this page to be transmitted across space and time to another soul in another moment somewhere else. Hello! And now it’s two minutes later, no, three, because that’s how long it took me to write this paragraph by hand.

Such a slow dance, now 20 minutes and more since I started scrawling, and yet the words hurry by as the reader reads. And how many images and sounds and aromas have I experienced that scrambled past so quickly I could never write them all down even if I remembered them all? So much to see and to say, and the words are inadequate, yet somehow suggest there was so much more in the moment. And that, I suppose, is for you to unravel.

W.B.’s Album Review: Dandelion

I like what Ella Langley has said about dandelions — they’re considered weeds but they’re also resilient, colorful, homey and they don’t have thorns. And while making her new album, Dandelion, she found out that dandelion tea is considered a liver detox. That made it a good name for the album that follows her last, still hungover.

In one interview she says, “The context was like, I’m growing and I’m not just doing debauchery every day of my life — maybe just on Tuesdays.”

Ella has a central role in the story of Mary and Warren. When Mary was trying to figure out how to get my attention, Ella’s song “You Look Like You Love Me” came on. It’s the story of a girl who walks up brazenly to a young buck and presents herself as someone he ought to take home.

At the end of the song, she advises her fellow girls, “If you ever see a man in a cowboy hat and you think to yourself, ‘I could use some of that,’ don’t waste your time …” And while it was not as brazen an approach as Ella’s, Mary presented herself to me with a very lovely hug.

I used to be very tied into what was happening in the Top 40 and Hot 100. I’d keep track of things like “McArthur Park” being a huge hit that peaked at #2, or the injustice of “Good Vibrations” never climbing higher than #4 despite being the greatest recording of all time. But I don’t pay much attention anymore, and so I was surprised to learn that Ella’s “Choosing Texas” was the No. 1 song for five weeks earlier this year — the No. 1 song, not just the No. 1 country song. It IS an awfully catchy tune with a bittersweet story.

And no one does bittersweet these days like Ella Langley. For example, she has an infectious love song called “Never Met Anyone Like You” that would probably be a massive wedding song except for the bridge, where she sings, “You said it was us to the end, then you went and hooked up with my friend.” She knows how to put an ache in her voice that can break your heart in a Nashville minute.

Which brings us to Dandelion, the album. It’s almost a full hour of personal, honest songs about love and heartbreak and being human and, my goodness, it is something to hear.

“I’m in the back half of my twenties and still figuring it out, but I feel like I do it with a little more confidence,” she says in the liner notes on Apple Music. “That’s why a lot of these songs represent that. They represent that feeling of, like, you know, you’re still figuring it out, but you’re trying to do it a little bit better each time.”

She did it a whole lot better this time. It’s great watching someone with whom you’ve made a personal connection turn into a star, and I hope and pray she continues to soar like this for a long time. Dandelion is available now in all the usual places.

Everyone knows

The wind blew in like March, just like the lady on the TV said it would. I heard the wind chimes start to dance and a sound like a jet passing low overhead.

We can’t see the wind, but we can see the grass and the trees bend, we can feel the rush on our face, and we can see manmade things tip and start to fly, and we conclude that it’s windy.

I have accumulated enough garbage and recycling that the bins will not topple tomorrow morning at the side of the road, but if this wind keeps up, I may have to fetch them from the ditch once they’re emptied. The other day I saw bins in the median of the four-lane highway.

A few years ago I heard a preacher say we never see the wind, but we see its effects, and therefore he believed in the wind.

It’s easy to believe in the wind. With all of creation around us, you’d think more people would believe in the Creator, too, but somehow that’s a bigger leap.