It always sort of bummed me out that I was not a poet. In fact, I resented it so much, I used to hate poetry, and made a deliberate effort to not understand it. Now I think of it as the most direct way of speaking, of communicating; the most beautiful. A good poem pulls no tricks and does not hold you away from itself. Every turn it takes is meaningful and necessary.
Poetry is anything but impenetrable. Isn’t that amazing?
I Go Back to May 1937, Sharon Olds
I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,
I see my father strolling out
under the ochre sandstone arch, the
red tiles glinting like bent
plates of blood behind his head, I
see my mother with a few light books at her hip
standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks with the
wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its
sword-tips black in the May air,
they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,
they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are
innocent, they would never hurt anybody.
I want to go up to them and say Stop,
don’t do it–she’s the wrong woman,
he’s the wrong man, you are going to do things
you cannot imagine you would ever do,
you are going to do bad things to children,
you are going to suffer in ways you never heard of,
you are going to want to die. I want to go
up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it,
her hungry pretty blank face turning to me,
her pitiful beautiful untouched body,
his arrogant handsome blind face turning to me,
his pitiful beautiful untouched body,
but I don’t do it. I want to live. I
take them up like the male and female
paper dolls and bang them together
at the hips like chips of flint as if to
strike sparks from them, I say
Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.
(see Sharon Olds )
Another poem, in honor of your poem.
AT THIS PARTY
I don’t want to be the only one here
Telling all the secrets –
Filling up all the bowls at this party,
Taking all the laughs.
I would like you
To start putting things on the table
That can also feed the soul
The way I do.
That way
We can invite
A hell of a lot more
Friends.
~Hafiz
When I’m not writing poetry, I get so upset just knowing that there are good poems being written. And not reading all of those good poems just makes things worse.
I couldn’t read more than a few lines of that.