These experiences are powerfully instructive. They teach you about yourself. The first poem by Sharon Olds I ever read (“The Pope’s Penis”) made me want to be a poet. Because of Olds’ bravery and boldness., I realized no subject was off limits. I could write about anything. Language was the key to the world.
Marie Howe writes about the power of language . . .
The Meadow
by: Marie Howe
As we walk into words that have waited for us to enter them, so
the meadow, muddy with dreams, is gathering itself together
and trying, with difficulty, to remember how to make wildflowers.
Imperceptibly heaving with the old impatience, it knows
for certain that two horses walk upon it, weary of hay.
The horses, sway-backed and self important, cannot divine
how the small white pony mysteriously escapes the fence every day.
This is the miracle just beyond their heavy-headed grasp,
and they turn from his nuzzling with irritation. Everything
is crying out. Two crows, rising from the hill, fight
and caw-cry in mid-flight, then fall and light on the meadow grass
bewildered by their weight. A dozen wasps drone, tiny prop planes,
sputtering into a field the farmer has not yet plowed,
and what I thought was a phone, turned down and ringing,
is the knock of a woodpecker for food or warning, I can’t say.
I want to add my cry to those who would speak for the sound alone.
But in this world, where something is always listening, even
murmuring has meaning, as in the next room you moan
in your sleep, turning into late morning. My love, this might be
all we know of forgiveness, this small time when you can forget
what you are. There will come a day when the meadow will think
suddenly, water, root, blossom, through no fault of its own,
and the horses will lie down in daisies and clover. Bedeviled,
human, your plight, in waking, is to choose from the words
that even now sleep on your tongue, and to know that tangled
among them and terribly new is the sentence that could change your life.
I love that last phrase—“the sentence that could change your life.” It’s a powerful thought. We all carry in our mouths words that can cause earthquakes, heal broken hearts, end hunger, stop wars. Think about it. If a war can be started by one lunatic who can’t string together a coherent thought, then peace can be achieved by a sane person who’s not afraid to say, “Give peace a chance.” (Thank you, John Lennon.)
Sorry that it has taken me so long to give an update after my last post about my wife’s health issues. I’ve been eyeballs deep in poetry for over a week. Last weekend, I visited a high school in Ann Arbor to talk poetry with the students. Then I participated in a reading at a bookstore in Dexter, Michigan. The next day, we drove to Detroit, had pizza with some family members I don’t get to see very often, including my grandniece Abby (one of my son’s favorite people). Then I read poems at Next Chapter Books in Detroit. (My first appearance in the Motor City—and my family came to support me.)
I didn’t have much of a chance to recover from this trip. Monday, I dove right into the Great Lakes Poetry Festival at the library where I work. Readings and writing workshops and movies and presentations. Poetry and poetry and poetry. I was surrounded by people who seize every day by the throat and refuse to let go. Poets.
I’m pretty exhausted tonight, but it’s a good exhaustion. Birthday exhaustion. Christmas exhaustion. You get the idea. It’s as if I’ve been laughing for a week straight, and now my sides are hurting and eyes are watering. I could happily sleep for a week, drunk on poetry.
As John Keating says in Dead Poets Society, “No matter what people tell you, words and ideas can change the world.”
Saint Marty wrote a new ghost poem this week . . .
Some Thoughts from the Ghost of Mary Oliver
by: Martin Achatz
You think you know me because you’ve read
my poems about Blackwater Pond and geese,
bears digging honey from rotten tree trunks.
But I never wrote about stepping onto my front
porch just as sun unzipped the horizon at dawn
and song sparrows shivered the pines with their
hungry music. I never scribbled how good it was
to stand in that cold air before the woods
stretched and yawned, how much I enjoyed
my first wild and precious cigarette of the day.
