Something happened to me this summer. My writing is morphing into something new, taking a different shape, being swayed and pulled in new directions. Perhaps it is my emotions that are demanding the reshaping, orchestrating this coup? Whatever it is that’s happening, I’ve been writing poetry, and learning about poetry, and meeting poets, and reading poetry, too. Poetry is gathered language that evokes a strong sense of beauty and feeling. This is one definition of poetry. One that I’ve been thinking about a lot. I’ve been encountering and striving to put myself in the way of other definitions and interpretations. I’m keeping an ear out for them. Feel free to send your definitions, found or otherwise, my way.
“Poetry is not a luxury,” Audre Lorde wrote in an essay by the same name, “it is a vital necessity of our existence.” Maybe poetry is helping me to feel real, to embody the fullness of myself. And maybe poetry has been my way of surviving through a time of change, uncertainty, and upheaval.
Poetry is the song of everyday life humming. It’s my dog pawing against my husband’s closed office door for food; the soft warmth of his muzzle tucked into my hand, as I feed him. It’s a place and space to find the words to set down against experience. A re-creation of moments, a cyanotype image.
In Bahar Orang’s meditation on beauty, Where Things Touch, there is this:
“As Helene Cixous puts it: I, too, overflow; my desires have invented new desires, my body knows unheard-of songs. Time and again I, too, have felt so full of luminous torrents that I could burst—”
Maybe poetry is the expression of those luminous torrents? Of my fragile heart bursting shards of light onto the page? I say my heart, because it is my heart doing the work, the heavy lifting.
Here’s a poem that sort of fell out of me when I let my guard down. I was meaning to be doing something else. Does poetry form in the annals of our periphery?
I’m thinking of patches of dappled light I saw on the floor of Algonquin forest. How does the light even get there, in those hard-to-reach places, beneath the canopy of all those leaves? But it does. Light finds a way.
I don’t want to explain my need for this poem. So I won’t.
What Could Be
Dedicated to my daughter’s extraordinary former educational assistants: Mme. Claudia, Mme. Joanne and Mme. Catherine (“Keegan”). Also, Mme. Suzanne. Vous êtes le soleil qui brille dans le ciel. You embody everything that could be.
The best ones
Never have to tell you
How good they are
That they know
Your child
Because they’ve worked
With one hundred of them before
The best ones
Talk
To the child
And look at
Whomever
They’re speaking to
Address the
human whole
Without
Needing to
Point out
The parts
that are broken,
Perceived
broken.
The best ones
Check in
After you’re gone
To see your shine
Light up the room
Engage you
In conversation
Conjure
Your magic
Evoke colours of the rainbow
That exist beyond the visible
spectrum of light
The best ones
Call you by your name
Hold a place for you in their hearts
Find pockets of space
Where you fit in
Foster the friends
Your hand will hold
Remember
You like it best
When the music is playing
And they let it play
As you instrument yourself
A fine tune
They sway to your every scale
Past when
The final note
Rings
Because they believe in seeing beyond
What isn’t necessarily there
to the naked eye
But what
could be.
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