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Posts Tagged ‘ars poetica’

The Girl Who Sat and Read in the Weeping Willow Tree

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on January 9, 2020| Leave a Comment »

 

 

 

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.

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The Poem Tries

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , 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.

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For Your Thoughts?

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , 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.

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How Many Pencils Would It Take?

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , 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.

 

 

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One While Reading Rumi

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on September 7, 2019| Leave a Comment »

 

 

 

explicating the love poem—

only later realizing

I’ve been stained red

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The Big Lesson

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , 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.

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On Walt Whitman’s 200th Birthday

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , 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

 

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One Heroic

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on April 4, 2019| 2 Comments »

 

for Phyllis

 

 

in the long darkness

she makes lanterns of poems

guides us one light at a time

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Emily in Love

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , 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

 

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One in Deep December

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , 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

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