Spaces Between Words
I have attended to your words
One vowel, one consonant,
One syllable at a time, their
Flow into a stream of thought.
I have listened to the spaces
Between them: short and long,
Ones that rush to be filled,
Spaces to linger in, dwell.
Letters alone never offer
Fulfillment but a place to start.
Letters only give me hints
But it is in the spaces
where I can breathe
and find you.
Dedicated to the participants of the International Psychohistorical Association Conference (May 19-21, 2022).
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Image Credit: Liminal Space painting by Holly Friesen [saatchiart.com]
Howard F. Stein is a poet as well as an applied, psychoanalytic, medical, and organizational anthropologist, psychohistorian, and organizational consultant. He is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Family and Preventive Medicine, University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center, Oklahoma City, OK, USA, where he taught for nearly 35 years. He is Poet Laureate of the High Plains Society for Applied Anthropology. From 1980-1988, he was Editor of The Journal of Psychoanalytic Anthropology. He has published some 300 poems. He has published 32 books, of which 10 are books or chapbooks of poetry. His most recent poetry books are Presence—Poems from Ghost Ranch (2020), Centre and Circumference (2018), and Light and Shadow (2018).
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