The Gift Of Poetry…
…poetry…speaks as no other language can. It does what no other art form can do. It compresses experience; it intensifies language; it uses words to say the unsayable…Poetry cracks open our everyday lives, the mundane worlds in which we spend so much unconscious time. It releases the extraordinary bringing us to a different level of consciousness. But poems do more than describe sounds or scenes. They actually become the sounds or scenes. You read a poem about the resurrection and you know a bit of what it feels like to have restored and renewed flesh. In order to have this effect poetry must ‘upset the ordinary ’ in some way.
The Thing Is…
to love life, to love it even.
you have now stomach for it
and everything you’ve held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water,
more fit for gills than lungs
when grief weights you like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, How can a body with stand this?
Then you hold life like face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.
~Ellen Bass