A bouquet of words

‘My earliest experience in art occurred at the Benjamin Rush public school,’ (Louis) Faurer remembers. ‘Miss Duncan, who seemed to float on a rose petal scent, having requested that numbers be written on paper with lead pencil, was shocked when my sheet yielded a drawing of a locomotive.’ He also submitted drawings to Walt Disney aged 13, who invited him out to California. ‘It seemed unreachable and so I didn’t go,’ he said

Louis Faurer (1916–2001) - New York photographer’. Click on The Guardian, 13 October 2016 to see photographic essay of his work.

The text above is the caption to image no.3 and what jumped out were the words 'Miss Duncan, who seemed to float on rose petal scent'. I lost the 'a' without noticing at first, yet it conjured up a powerful image in my head, not at all related to the photograph itself:

Photograph © Louis Faurer estate, courtesy of Deborah Bell and Howard Greenberg Gallery. An exhibition of Faurer's work is at Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris, until 18 December 2016.

The description of Miss Duncan reminded me of my first ever 'poem' written just after Christmas 2010, which I called 'Unknown Certainty'. The first four lines were:

Grey blue eyes and rowan hair

Smell of cloves and apple pie

To all the world another woman

To me a perfect vision

The poem is my account of my first evening with Susan. I ramble on with another four verses before ending:

There is no going back

The past's undone

The future beckons

Unknown certainty awaits.

Susan is not alone in this respect and Miss Duncan reminds me of this. All the stories we tell or we write come from somewhere and, I suspect, smell is more important than we realise. 

'A bouquet of words' sounds like an original thought, but it isn't. Typing the words into the web, I came up with this link to a blog post by a writer called Sean Platt:

http://writetodone.com/how-to-build-a-perfect-bouquet-of-words/

Well worth reading if you have any doubts about yourself as a writer. Here are a couple of paragraphs:

'Each of us has what it takes to be a better writer.  It is already inside us, waiting for its salutation. For some, this means discarding the rules that the gatekeepers have handed down, and listening to the quiet whisper of our instinct.  Only we know how we view the world, and it is us who best understand how to make our thoughts sing...

When we speak through our heart, our fingers dance across the keyboard or glide across the page, then we can make every post as pretty as a bouquet, each word placed as perfect as a posy.'