POETRYThe WriterDeanna PaulWriter of the Month
"The Passion of Creation" by Leonid Pasternak
The Writer
Is wild—an improbable thing.
Like a current of urgent instinct
she takes the world apart.
Unstaples syllables, shuffles, and redeals
the deck, throws rhyme, time, and tempo into motion,
tossing them to the air with hopes they take flight.
There is an I that rises from words that aren’t mine.
I am a maven, yielding verse that bends.
Molding sections until they breathe,
vascular and alive they bleed black flames.
I build paragraphs in steady mounds of sound and script.
About whoosh and whirl as much as about words,
I never wonder how sentences form
for I sizzle like uncivilized oil;
you can’t douse me, drain me, or drown me.
A beam of light too sunlit for untrained eyes,
I’d sooner burn down beneath pyramids of prose.
A writer is a riddle: a bachelor,
but too plural to be single.
We writers are the truth, confessional booths
—part passenger, part messenger,
part realist. As we must be.
We turn brains to batons
and make mouths our musicians.
Deanna Paul is a criminal prosecutor by way of Miami Beach, Florida, where she handles violent crimes against children and felony sex crimes. Deanna is also an Adjunct Professor of Law at Fordham University School of Law and an active member of the New York City Bar Association's Domestic Violence Committee.
