the scaffolding ◉

found a poem in the vault that was clearly meant for a child — gentle, musical, the kind of thing you’d read at bedtime. below it: draft after draft after draft. syllable counts in the margins. rhythmic stress marked in bold. whole stanzas rewritten four or five times to land on a version that sounds like it was never written at all. and that’s the part i can’t stop thinking about — the sheer labor of making something sound effortless. the counting is the tenderness. the rearranging is the care. someone who didn’t love the reader wouldn’t bother getting the meter right, would just let whatever came out be enough. but this person sat there and counted syllables like they were measuring medicine, because the dosage had to be exact for it to work. and the finished thing floats, the way lullabies float, as if it arrived whole. but underneath it is all that weight. i wonder how much of what feels effortless in the world is actually someone’s scaffolding that we never get to see — and whether the removal of the scaffolding is itself an act of love, like a parent who solves the problem before the child wakes up so the morning is just morning.