Poetry may make us from time to time
a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings
which form the substratum of our being,
to which we rarely penetrate;
for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.
—T.S. Eliot
Tag: poet
A Deeper Well
The whole process is a lie,
unless,
crowned by excess,
it break forcefully,
one way or another,
from its confinement--
or find a deeper well...
I love you
or I do not live
at all.
At our age the imagination
across the sorry facts
lifts us
to make roses
stand before thorns.
Sure
love is cruel
and selfish
and totally obtuse--
At least, blinded by the light,
young love is.
But we are older,
I to love
and you to be loved,
we have,
no matter how,
by our wills survived
to keep
the jeweled prize
always
at our fingertips.
We will it so
and so it is
past all accident.
~William Carlos Williams, excerpts from “The Ivy Crown”
written at age 72, published in Journey to Love
How can we, at our age,
who have treated love as no accident,
looking into a well
of such depth and richness,
how can we tell the young
to will their love to survive –
to strive through thorns and briars,
though tears wept and flesh torn,
to come to cherish the prize
of rose and ivy crown.
It is everything that matters,
this crown of love
we have willed and worn together:
I love you or I do not live at all.
I to love and you to be loved.
Going In
Let us go in; the fog is rising…
~Emily Dickinson, her last words
I have watched the dying
in their last hours:
often they see what I cannot,
listen to what is beyond my hearing,
stretch their arms overhead
as fingers touch what is beyond my reach.
I watch and wonder what it will be like
to reverse the steps that brought me here
from the fog of amnion.
The mist of living lifts
as we enter a place
unsurpassed in brilliance and clarity;
the mystery of what lies beyond solved
simply by going in.
Not Poet Enough
photo by Josh Scholten
If your everyday life seems poor to you, do not accuse it; accuse yourself, tell yourself you are not poet enough to summon up its riches; since for the creator there is no poverty and no poor or unimportant place.
― Rainer Maria Rilke
As a child, I would sometimes spend long rainy afternoons languishing on the couch, complaining to my mother how boring life was. Her typical response was to remind me my boredom said more about me than about life– I became the accused, rather than the accuser, failing to summon up life’s riches. Thus convicted, my sentence followed: she would promptly give me chores to do. I learned not to voice my complaints about life because it always meant work.
Some things haven’t changed, even fifty years later. Whenever I am tempted to feel pitiful or bored, accusing my life of being poor or unfair, I need to remember what that says about me. If I’m not poet enough to celebrate the gilded edge of the plain and simple, if I’m not poet enough to articulate beauty even in the sharp thorns of life, if I’m not poet enough to recognize the creator’s brilliance in every molecule, then it is my poverty I’m accusing, not his.
Back to work then. There is a life to be lived and poems to be written.
