Poetry Friday: Poetry Forgives

[Flickr: Robyn Gallagher]

Poetry Forgives

I can’t believe I left

you at the market

lost you to a shiny eggplant

so smooth you could read

by its reflection, as if purple

were a midnight lake

and you a word dropped in;
illuminating a thousand nests, dark
from dark, along the thistled shore

while I went home 

plastic bags of groceries 

on my arms, low-hanging fruit

dumped to the tiled floor

while I ran back, calling

loon-like, in hunger 

to the eggplant, 

singing now with oiled

throaty pleasure

---Sara Lewis Holmes (all rights reserved)

A friend and I were discussing how I'd let this blog and my poetry fall idle.  After he gently scolded me for that, I said, thank goodness, poetry forgives.  

I believe that. Poetry forgives a reader's first attempts to hold it, awkwardly like a baby. It forgives the insults and slander we hurl at it at times. It overlooks how ridiculously we pose it, in a velour track suit, on a pedestal, then ignore its musty gaze.  It  even forgives our insecure, pretentious stabs when we take sharpened pencil in hand and poke holes in the paper of our lives to see what bleeds. 

All we need do is return.  Poetry is nothing if not a way home. 

Poetry Friday is hosted today by Robyn at Read, Write Howl. The full schedule is at A Year of Reading, here.