When it Clicks

Atlanta Parent

WHEN IT CLICKS

I had always thought poetry was just adults hiding simple ideas beneath fancy words, like putting a hat on a squirrel and calling it fashion. Then, on a lazy Tuesday afternoon, somewhere between a metaphor and a badly behaved comma, the poet said something that cracked the code.

Suddenly, words stopped sitting on the page like obedient little soldiers. They began to really live. A blue door could be sadness. Rain could remember. A sentence could turn a corner and come back wearing somebody else’s face.

I felt the whole room tilt.

The poem wasn’t something I was writing anymore. It was something I was seeing.

And there it was—bright, impossible, grinning at me in words, and the iridescent image swims through a mirror that flows.

Oh.

That’s what poetry does.

I got it.

And, frankly, the universe has been showing off ever since.

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This Prosery shared with DVerse Poets Pub in celebration of my hometown boy, Stanley Kunitz. (We claim Elizabeth Bishop, and Richard Fox, as well) The bold line comes from his KING OF THE RIVER

©2026 Christopher Reilley 

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