I love writing poetry. I love the slow and careful craft, how I must decide which word to choose for a particular description in a way that keeps the cadence of the poem, in a way that sounds beautiful and true. I love how each word is significant, each word pulls its weight, even a “the” or an “and.” I love how at times a poem forms spontaneously in my mind, full-fledged with each line in place just so, barely needing an edit. And I love, too, how other poems take days to hatch and grow, feathering out gently, lines crossed over, words changed around, until finally they assume their final shape.
Do I write good poetry? I doubt it most of the time. :) I read other poets and am heart-stopped by the startling innovation or technical skill of their lines; I look back at my own poetry and it is mediocre at best.
But I love to write and share poetry for more than just the literary quality of it. Poems open up a door to hilarity, curiosity, wonder, grief, and swooning delight in a way that thicker reams of writing rarely can. Poems are snapshots of the human experience; shutter-clicks of our commonalities.
And so I believe writing and reading poetry matters, even if the poet is still very much in process and learning to wield the tools of poetry-creation (hi, yes, that’s me).
For the month of June, I am taking part in Lore Ferguson Wilbert’s 30-days-without-social-media challenge. Now, I feel like I’m half-cheating in participating, since I don’t use social media all that frequently and it’s fairly easy to forswear it for a month (if you asked me to give up my YouTube documentaries, that would be another question!). But I am all-in for the goal of this challenge: to make intentional space for creative work.
So for the first week of the month of June, I challenged myself to write one poem a day. I wanted to notice the moments I experience in daily life, fluttering past me like butterflies, unheeded and unappreciated, and hold them in my hand for just a bit. One of the questions/prompts that Wilbert sent out to participants was: “What do I see right now? Taste? Smell? Touch? Hear?” Those occasions of stopping and simply noticing for a bit helped inspire me.
Wendell Berry’s poem “How to Be a Poet” also informed this week of writing poetry (another thing Wilbert sent her readers’ way, and I’m so grateful because I had never read it before, and it is lovely). The first lines read: "Make a place to sit down. / Sit down. Be quiet.” A simple, gentle demand, but one that sometimes feels impossible to fulfill, especially amid the busy chaos of summer.
But there is always room for that. The sitting down, the silence. And I’m always better for it.
So here, without further ado. Sit and read and maybe smile at a line or two.
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Gun metal skies clamp down over gritty streets that reek of dank air, ash, dead earth; sticky spider web air clings too close— and I pick the strawberries in the back yard. Growth is inconvenient, harvest is hard work; strawberry seeds stick to wet skin, tiny relentless specks of annoyance. But I think this might be worth the ache in my back, the tired arms scratched from reaching through black bird netting, clammy rain water spilling from each green crevice an irritation untold. Because here is forty-eight square feet of wealth to share. Here is forty-eight square feet of red fruit, daily bread. Here is forty-eight square feet of leafy hands raising their resistance to a rotting sky, pressing away the stink of this city.
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I’m bad at writing poetry No, I really am: I don’t have the words to give you, A rhyme, a rhythm, a dance. I’m no Mary Oliver, Annie Dillard, Robert Frost; No William Yeats, no Edna St. Vincent Millay. I’ve no thundering inspiration to shake you, Lightening of truth to split open your sky. All I have is this, a picture: Me, sitting in the curved-back deck chair, In blue linen and cotton stripes, Watching the trees toss hardy June leaves, Dreaming of mint tea, strawberries, Stories to weave, While my daughter’s curls wave In the breeze. Me, drunk on life for half an hour: Before I pick up my phone again.
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The rain asks nothing of me it simply falls a quiet cacophony of comfort in the darkening day. Shhh. Listen.
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Leaves swing in the wind waves breaking on green shores, and I listen to the rush, the rustle: I waited six months for this. Every winter I feel as if I might die like my heart is shriveling to bitter roots before the leaves are reborn. Now at last the air glides over skin like a mother robin’s wings and this yard becomes a nest in which to nestle before my mind spins into the updraft, into the glossy swirling whirlpools of the early summer leaves. So for today, I swim. For today, I forget cruel dark winters and flounder, kick, dive, stroke, soar in heady, laughing currents of leafy new life.
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I lie awake at eleven p.m. smelling grassy summer air leaking through the drafty bedroom window: a stream of memory. I like awake at eleven p.m. remembering the wide open windows of my childhood: when child me lay in a bed in a house surrounded by tall soldiers of thick green trees; when child me lay awake listening to the rhythms of the katydids and crickets the spring peepers, cackling wood frogs, the pond frogs’ guttural glunks, the beefy bullfrogs with their deep bass drum beat: how that ear-thrumming chorus rose and fell in a long elongation— then a throaty pause— a wailing interjection from a Fowler’s toad— then another rise of clamorous rasp— until the pause became longer and longer and longer, until I slept, and those small creatures, too, surrendered to the silence of night.
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