Even then she was becoming
a dreamer, a lover of bark,
a student of solitude. Even then
she noticed how there were places
and moods that words couldn’t touch—
even then she felt the joy in trying anyway.
Posts Tagged ‘ars poetica’
The Girl Who Sat and Read in the Weeping Willow Tree
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ars poetica, becoming, poem, poetry, reading, tree on January 9, 2020| Leave a Comment »
The Poem Tries
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Alabama, ars poetica, augusta kantra, meditation, poem, poetry on December 9, 2019| 2 Comments »
Let yourself be danced.
—Augusta Kantra
The poem sits down to be written.
Instead, it stares at the bay.
There’s a highway in the distance
that could take it all the way to California.
The poem doesn’t want to go to California.
It wants to be present, just here,
on the sandy bank beside the driftwood.
It wants to find its inner poem.
It wants to get out of its own way,
to obey its emerging form.
Instead, it watches the tall grass
getting danced by the wind.
It sighs. The poem wants to know
what it doesn’t know yet.
And the poem wants to be good.
Dammit. It tries to lower its standards,
then judges, compares and tries to fix itself.
It lists. It sits cross legged till its legs
fall asleep. It is a book of sorrows,
a tree of anxiety, a wave of failure.
It’s a cage of empty lines. How
did it get into this straight jacket?
The poem gives up. It stares at the bay.
Watches the grasses sway. Notices
how the wind blows its hair,
lifts its hands. The poem doesn’t know
why it’s weeping. In that moment,
the poem is danced.
For Your Thoughts?
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ars poetica, money, penny, poem, poetry on November 5, 2019| 6 Comments »
This year it costs 1.8 cents to make a penny.
It is, perhaps, similar to spending an hour
on an eleven-line poem that very few people
will read. And still, they mint the penny.
And still, I write the poem. Because
tradition. Because poems and pennies
are easy to spend. Because sometimes
the small things make life better—
something to wish on, something
valuable beyond its surface, something
humble to catch the light.
How Many Pencils Would It Take?
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ars poetica, pencil, poem, poetry, science, story on September 8, 2019| 2 Comments »
The pencil, it turns out,
has never contained lead.
It’s always been graphite—
a form of solid carbon.
How much of what we think
we know is just a mistaken story
passed on for centuries?
And the human body, it turns out,
contains enough carbon
for 9,000 pencils—
that is a fact of the world,
a fact like the distance
from earth to the moon,
a fact like 99 percent of all human DNA
is the same. I’d like to think I will use up
my pencils, one every three days,
writing the story of what it is
to be alive here, to fall in love,
to disagree, to fail, to try again.
I want to write of healing,
write of the autumn air,
how it touches everything
with its cool transparency.
Write of how we are here
to revel in beauty, to find ourselves
in each other, to serve a story greater
than the one we know how to write,
serve the story that even now
is writing us.
One While Reading Rumi
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ars poetica, love, poem, poetry, Rumi on September 7, 2019| Leave a Comment »
The Big Lesson
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ars poetica, learning, poem, poetry, teaching on August 5, 2019| 14 Comments »
I’m still learning.
—Michelangelo, on his deathbed
Sometimes I feel as if
I missed something.
Something big. The sermon
that would forge a love affair
with the divine.
The history lesson
that would teach me
how to forgive myself.
The webinar that would train
me in doing the right thing
at the right time. If only
I had read the right book
or met the right coach
or drunk the right tea. If only.
I don’t believe it, not really,
though sometimes
I wish it were as easy
as auditing a class.
Perhaps that is why
I write poems.
I’m taking notes.
Because sometimes
the truth slips into them.
Because it’s surprisingly easy
to forget.
On Walt Whitman’s 200th Birthday
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ars poetica, poem, poetry, spider, Walt Whitman on May 31, 2019| Leave a Comment »
When you wrote of the spider
launching through vacant space,
reeling from one sphere of meaning
to another, you didn’t know then
that you wrote that poem for me.
Two centuries later, this woman
reads about the bridges we are all
trying to form, and Walt, damned
if that wasn’t filament coming out
through your electric fingers.
https://poets.org/poem/noiseless-patient-spider
One Heroic
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ars poetica, friendship, phyllis k, poem, poetry on April 4, 2019| 2 Comments »
for Phyllis
in the long darkness
she makes lanterns of poems
guides us one light at a time
Emily in Love
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ars poetica, emily dickinson, love, maria popova, poem, poetry on March 6, 2019| 2 Comments »
We are the only poets, and everyone else is prose.
—Emily Dickinson, in a letter to Susan Gilbert
It is perhaps an inner drum,
the meter of the soul
that sometimes finds a resonance
inside another’s halls—
an inner song, an inner scheme
that rhymes with someone else’s,
a dream that scans like heartbeats
inside the other’s pulse.
Yes in this world of counterfeit,
such thrill to find a poem
that redefines Circumference—
and curious, leads us home.
for more on the love letters and life-changing love of Emily Dickinson, read the fabulous Brain Pickings by Maria Popova,
https://mailchi.mp/brainpickings/emily-dickinson-love-letters?e=ea2d3e439a
One in Deep December
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ars poetica, dark, poem, poetry, solstice on December 18, 2018| 3 Comments »
the night asked me
to read its poetry, all that ink
scrawled across the world—
reading late without the light,
I, too, become page, poem
Sign up for my daily poem!
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