As you might gather by my blatherings, I love poetry. I wish I could write my own but am content with loving the poetic wisdom of others. Oh, let me be honest. I don’t really think I want to write my own as it would hurt too much. Good poetry involves pain as indicated by one of my favorite poets, Carl Sandburg, who noted, “The fire-born are at home in the fire.” And W. H. Auden noted of W. B Yeats, “Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.” And just this week I came across a poet, Matiullah Turab, who composes elegant poetry in the war-torn chaos of Afghanistan, reflecting the anguish that he and his fellow Afghani brothers and sisters endure daily. (NOTE: He is almost totally illiterate and must depend on friends to transcribe his spoken word or record them.)

We are verbal creatures in a world that, according to some, is a Word being spoken in a bleak void. And, according to this notion, each of us is himself/herself an individual word being spoken, with the capacity to delve into his/her heart and find his/her own voice. I haven’t found the courage to dive there yet and am not for sure I ever will and am not for sure that I even want to and if I don’t I do not feel that I will have to answer to any punitive deity about my “disobedience.” But these poets, including some of you who read this “stuff”, have taken this “dive” into subjective experience and produce lovely poetic wisdom for which I am so grateful.

I want to share yet another marvelous bit of wisdom which I just ran across moments ago in the Christian Science Monitor:

WRITERS INVITATION
BY Richard Schiffman

to sink like a snapping turtle into the bottom-mud of memory
to repair like the bear to a den of transformation
to huddle like the mallard with the myriad ducks you are
to tuck butter-bill to feather sealed tighter than a letter
to ice over like a pond shut fast against the weather
to spin as the snowflake your own essential crystal
to rest not upon your laurels, but on something elemental
to flock not southward, but to the heart’s true north
to head not outward, but to your own magnetic core
to burst not as the blossom into a hemorrhage of petals
but like ice within some hairline crack or cranny
shattering from within the granite mask you’re wearing
revealing the clear, the sheer, the unbirthed face
that summer’s mazed exuberance swells to hide.