Introduction to Where Words Wait
Some days the penfeels heavy, the mind crowded, and every line you try to force just slips away like dust on a breeze. This poem comes from one of these days – from stepping out instead, onto the sun-warmed lanes that you know, and learning what the land has always known: the truest things never need to be rushed.
There is an old Irish way of seeing words not as things we make, but in things we meet – waiting for us in the quiet, in the dust, in the space between one breath and the next.
Fanann siad, the Irish phrase woven here, means simply “They Wait” – and they do: the stories held in old wheel-tracks, the songs in a blackbird’s hum, the lines that will only come when you stop trying hard to catch them.
These lines walk through that slow, soft world: where a dog’s sharp bark is just him minding his own ground, where skylarks spill light from the sky, where the dust keeps every tale it has ever known long before we find the words to speak it. It is a poem about listening first – before you write, before you walk, before you hurry anything at all.
Where Words Wait
The dust lies on lane and lintel,
slow to rise, slow to settle.
I do not force the line today -
fanann siad; they know their way.
A skylark spills from high blue air,
a wren weaves deep through whitethorn boughs;
a blackbird hums by an old stone gate
while the world breathes, and does not wait.
One sharp bark breaks the hedge's hush -
he means no harm, just marks his ground;
paws shift soft where clover grows,
then settle back to silence once again.
Old wheel-tracks hold the sun's own heat;
footsteps fade where breezes meet.
The dust keeps every tale it knows
before a single word is drawn.
The sun slips low on bough and bend,
no need to run, no need to mend.
What belongs will find its place,
in light, in dust, in quiet grace.
So I walk slow and listen long,
till the land hums my own song.
For lines that rush will never stay;
the truest words know how to wait.
Copyright © 2026 Pat Fitzgerald
All Rights Reserved
Thank you for joining me on this journey of writing and discovery. Poetry, for me, is a continuous learning process. A way of finding my own voice and writing style and exploring the beauty of words.
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Pat Fitzgerald
patman4u.com 