Step in the Cycle
Free Verse PoemIn 2022, I saw a call for entries for a poetry collection around the topic of rain, titled When it Rains, it Pours. It asked for speculative poetry (that is, the poetry equivalent to Science fiction and fantasy). I decided to participate with this poem I wrote off the prompt, focusing on the water cycle, and originally titled it Part of the Cycle.
The poem got accepted for inclusion quickly, but then misfortune struck — the editor&apo;s home got struck by a storm and the project got understandably put on halt before selection was complete. Sadly, nothing has been heard of the project since and now that almost three years have passed, I no longer expect it to materialize. Especially seeing how final selection was never finished.
In a way, this is a small blessing in that I immediately grew to dislike the original title in favor of the current one, Step in the Cycle.
Because it's a rather long poem and the many breaks don't exactly help with that, it's hard to get into the usual places for poetry publication. So I decided to not try that way again and record a version for YouTube. I did not want this poem to go to waste, I do consider it maybe my best, but certainly my most emotional one.
The storyteller it adresses is not a specific real person, more a general idea of the grandparent who tells stories and has that become part of their legacy.
For the video, I tried a somewhat different approach from my previous videos, using different stock footage for backgrounds of the different sections and revealing each line alongside the spoken lines until the section of two stanzas each is complete. I think the result went well, even though the last piece of stock footage turned out to be about 10 seconds too short for its part of the recording and so I had to use part of it twice.
August 2025
Recording available at 
