What is it that inspires you to write?

Many people have asked me, “What is it that inspires you to write?”

The simple answer is that my very soul compels me to write. I have known that I was a writer since I was six years old, some 50 years ago. Over the years I have written about many things. For example, I've been a poet since the age of 15, and have self-published several books of my poetry. Love, nature, feelings, family and friends have been particular inspirations for most of my poetry. I wrote the following poem, Desperation, just over three years ago. It describes some of my feelings about watching my father slide inexorably towards death (he passed away January 25, 2006).

Desperation

My father knows desperation,

Has seen it welcoming him with open arms

As his family tearfully leaves him

At the warehouse of the useless & dying

He would die, too, if he could,

Drop his body like old clothes

And enter the beckoning doorway

Of light just around the corner –

I, too, know desperation,

That helpless feeling of doom,

Of nothing ever being right again,

Of impending death –

There is nothing for it,

For in the end we all

Go out the way

We came in… alone –

I am desperate for my father’s release,

Desperate for my own surcease,

Stumbling through the abandoned fields

Of a place I once called home –

Steve Ryals

Greenfield

01.10.03