I’ve been struggling with words recently. Octavio Paz’s ‘fire of every day’ hasn’t been sparking. There were whole stories to tell which will always be waiting. Pink drinks and fairy tales. Sun-coloured, night-lit balconies. Singing in the rain. Motorbikes through puddles. Sleepiest of surprising smiles in an early morning queue. Drip of sweat and waterfalls. They are bright-full-day and hot-sticky-night stories, Madrid at its maddest, magicalest, marvellousest best. Too foreign for the cloudy country, the grey days. Too far away from the green and the garden, the lake and the listening. And momentarily I am lost. Momentarily, regularly, confusingly, for weeks.

Sometimes the sun comes out. There are flowers. There is laughter. But words are, mostly, miserably, absent. There are so many out there, over there, around and about. Yet, lonely without them, I curl into evening tightness. Missing their muddle, by day I harden into straight lines.

And so, to a poetry workshop, where a stream-like Scottish voice soothes me into not minding their absence from my life, as I watch them flow from his. Verbs are the little dancers, he says. Comb the sheep, he suggests. Listen to what makes the best words, in the best order. Find the sacred space, the sacred time. And I sort of know it all already, but it’s nice to be told again. Not just nice, necessary. I need to hear to never fall out of love with language, to wonder at words.

I do wonder. I wonder, mainly, when they’ll work again. When the mixing of tongues will leave me with a playground of languages to play with, instead of this current wasteland. But I also do as I’m told, in the twenty minutes we are given to write about scent and childhood, and scratch the sounds out of me. I wriggle and rummage and come up with this:

There is a dampness to it.
Dirty, you might say.
Soily toed. Bits of life
fall through clinging air
to settle on cardigans.

I could go out today
to trees across the road -
sniff under branches,
prod at definitions,
poke at memories.

Of course, it’s not the scent
as such, the mushy leaves,
the puddled path,
but the smell of conversations
out walking with a dog.

Circling dog, grass,
sky and dripping tree.
That bit of childhood you asked for
is a damp and dappled place
between sun and snow,
the wet and waiting wood.

And it’s nothing much, but it’s words, at least. Not the best ones in the best order. There wasn’t time for that. Not the full story. Not the thing of brilliance we each want to create each time we hear the little starting-whispers, pointing their possibilities towards the song in its mysterious, perfect whole. But it’s a beginning, it’s the first handful in the finding-fight of every day.

Poetry workshop given by Kenneth Steven in Mungrisedale Village Hall in July.
www.kennethsteven.co.uk