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| [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
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.
