I didn’t grow up reading or writing poetry. My only memory of it as a child was memorizing and reciting Joyce Kilmer’s well-known poem Trees. But then, about 15 years ago, I was introduced to a poet by the name of David Whyte. He does speeches and trainings based on both his poetry and that of others. I watched video tapes of these, bought his books, and even spent a weekend at a retreat where he was the speaker. He opened the world of poetry to me. And since April is National Poetry Month, I thought I’d share a couple with you today.
Here is how Whyte describes the power of poetry.
The Lightest Touch
Good poetry begins with
the lightest touch,
a breeze arriving from nowhere,
a whispered healing arrival,
a word in your ear,
a settling into things,
then like a hand in the dark
it arrests the whole body,
steeling you for revelation.In the silence that follows
a great line
you can feel Lazarus
deep inside
even the laziest, most deathly afraid
part of you,
lift up his hands and walk toward the light.
There are so many amazing poems that call out the “laziest, most deathly afraid part of me.” But perhaps none better on this April morning than the words Maya Angelou recited that January morning back in 1993: On the Pulse of Morning.
A Rock, A River, A Tree
Hosts to species long since departed,
Marked the mastodon.
The dinosaur, who left dry tokens
Of their sojourn here
On our planet floor,
Any broad alarm of their hastening doom
Is lost in the gloom of dust and ages.But today, the Rock cries out to us, clearly, forcefully,
Come, you may stand upon my
Back and face your distant destiny,
But seek no haven in my shadow.I will give you no more hiding place down here.
You, created only a little lower than
The angels, have crouched too long in
The bruising darkness,
Have lain too long
Face down in ignorance.Your mouths spilling words
Armed for slaughter.The Rock cries out today, you may stand on me,
But do not hide your face.Across the wall of the world,
A River sings a beautiful song,
Come rest here by my side.Each of you a bordered country,
Delicate and strangely made proud,
Yet thrusting perpetually under siege.Your armed struggles for profit
Have left collars of waste upon
My shore, currents of debris upon my breast.Yet, today I call you to my riverside,
If you will study war no more. Come,Clad in peace and I will sing the songs
The Creator gave to me when I and the
Tree and the stone were one.Before cynicism was a bloody sear across your
Brow and when you yet knew you still
Knew nothing.The River sings and sings on.
There is a true yearning to respond to
The singing River and the wise Rock.…
Here, root yourselves beside me.
I am the Tree planted by the River,
Which will not be moved.I, the Rock, I the River, I the Tree
I am yours–your Passages have been paid.Lift up your faces, you have a piercing need
For this bright morning dawning for you.History, despite its wrenching pain,
Cannot be unlived, and if faced
With courage, need not be lived again.Lift up your eyes upon
The day breaking for you.Give birth again
To the dream.Women, children, men,
Take it into the palms of your hands.Mold it into the shape of your most
Private need. Sculpt it into
The image of your most public self.
Lift up your hearts
Each new hour holds new chances
For new beginnings.Do not be wedded forever
To fear, yoked eternally
To brutishness.The horizon leans forward,
Offering you space to place new steps of change.
Here, on the pulse of this fine day
You may have the courage
To look up and out upon me, the
Rock, the River, the Tree, your country.No less to Midas than the mendicant.
No less to you now than the mastodon then.
Here on the pulse of this new day
You may have the grace to look up and out
And into your sister’s eyes, into
Your brother’s face, your country
And say simply
Very simply
With hope
Good morning.
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this April morning in 2009? I’m thinking the rock, river and tree are still putting out the same invitation.
The universe may be smarter than we are…
A Conversation with Myself
…ever, there near the end.
Author
but I’m struck by how much these words echo what Angelou said 16 years ago.
Billy Collins was a poet laureate. How to read poetry? He tells what it’s is all about in the following:
Introduction to Poetry
I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide
or press an ear against its hive.
I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,
or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.
I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.
But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.
altoid
I needed some poetry today/tonight.
Here’s one I like a lot, particularly on my mind since we have had daffodils blooming here for the past month.
I WANDERED LONELY AS A CLOUD
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine
and twinkle on the Milky Way,
They stretched in never-ending line
along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
in such a jocund company:
I gazed – and gazed – but little thought
what wealth the show to me had brought:
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
– William Wordsworth
“I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” (erroneously known as “The Daffodils”) is an 1804 poem by William Wordsworth. It was inspired by an April 15, 1802 event in which Wordsworth and his sister, Dorothy, came across a “long belt” of daffodils. It was first published in 1807, and a revised version was released in 1815.
The poem is written in iambic tetrameter”
A lighter tone than most posted here, and an oldy – but nonetheless a goody…