As a researcher the author began to reflect on her role on a team project as she and her colleagues developed a research design and Letter of Intent (LOI) for submission to a funding agency. The area of research interest was interprofessional collaboration. The author and her colleagues intended to observe a team of health professionals collaborating in health care decisions. The research team had not worked together previously, which provided an ideal forum for observing their own collaborative development. The team’s observations and reflections might prepare them for observing the collaborative practices of other teams. However, they found collaboration difficult to put into practice. The reflection presented here is author’s alone. As the author pondered her role in the team, she found the economy of words in poetry forced her to explicitly think about and face, emotionally, the part she played in the team’s stilted collaborative efforts. As a team, the author and her colleagues continue to work at collaboration.