Melissa posted this quote on her Country Families discussion forum: "There is just enough room in the world for all the people in it, but there is no room for the fences which separate them."

From that I twiddled to come up with the couplet published today in Cloud Couplets.

Room Enough

The world holds room enough for all mankind,
But not for fences raised to hide behind.

Melissa responded, "How do you do that???? Very nice, better than the original..." Now, it's hard to go back and reconstruct a mental process, but I tried this brief description:

"I try to get a feel for meter, rearranging the words to make the meter flow, and keeping my eyes out for possible words to rhyme. I started out with the line ending "for all its folk," or something like that. Except nothing to rhyme with. So I looked for synonyms for folk. Often I pull out the thesaurus. Often. This time, though, mankind popped up, and behind was, well, right behind it. After that, it pretty well fell into place.

"A little practice, an ear for sound, a sense of beat. For me, a fun aside and pasttime."

There is more to it than that, I'm sure, but you'd be bored stiff. Sometimes even my mental processes leave me tired....

-- Anonymous, November 17, 2001