The Marcellus Free Library is encouraging us to share poetry with each other. Pocket poems, those that can physically fit on a half sheet of paper, to fit into a faux blue jeans pocket … but they will take any length, rhyme or free verse.
Why poetry?
It seems that humans and maybe even non-humans are drawn to the wholeness of poetry. Poetry is something beyond the didactic, the descriptive, the authentic, because it is more didactic, more descriptive and more authentic, reaching places where words alone fall short. Poetry engages the listener in mystical ways, evoking a consciousness born of filling in where the words leave off.
“Poem in October” by Dylan Thomas, a poem that had me at its first line, describes the author’s 30th birthday. I first read it while in college, well before I was 30. It spoke to me powerfully then. It still speaks powerfully now, when 30 is only a vague memory.
“And I rose/ In a rainy autumn/ And walked abroad in shower of all my days” – lines packed with so much meaning for anyone, but especially for me. That is how it is with poetry … meanings that are common, transcendent, in the magic of their construction … a special meaning for each of us.
Poetry is not limited to words. 30,000-year-old cave paintings at Lascaux, Trois Frers and Altamira are thought to be examples of another kind of enchantment known as sympathetic magic. The ancient artist drew an animal on the cave wall impaled with an arrow conjuring a connection that will lead to a successful hunt. Some theorists believe that in addition to the magical impulse, there are, on those walls, examples of poetry for people without a written language. The depictions of animals can very well be the artist telling us about his totems, those creatures with which he or she shares a soul or they may be a way of sharing their beauty. The handprints alone say, “I was here.”
There are the classical poets, Byron, Keats, Donne, whose long powerful verses have become part of the established metaphor, but today, for most of us, poetry comes with the modern troubadour, the song writer who captures that combination of words that share meanings so common and yet so special that we remember them, own them digitally and memorize without difficulty. I’m thinking now of the tender song popularized by Bette Midler, The Rose:
Just remember in the winter
Far beneath the bitter snows
Lies the seed that with the sun’s love
In the spring becomes the rose
A pox on the poet who crafts the dense, obscure lines that need reference works to understand. That is not poetry, but a narcissistic weaving of personal pique. A poem can be like Thomas’s lovely evocative words, “And I saw in the turning so clearly a child’s/ Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother/ Through the parables/ Of sunlight/ And the legends of the green chapels”
Or words as silly as Jack Prelutsky’s “Be glad your nose is on your face/not pasted on some other place.”
They both reach us all.
There are Saturday-mornings-on-the-creek poetry where a father and his little boys come to throw rocks, for no particular reason and for a most particular reason … a poem of several purposes that the boys will take with them into their future. There is poetry in the interplay between a mother and her child as she reads a bedtime story and tucks her little ones safely into bed, as she folds away a child’s clothing remembering the sweetness of little hands and hugs and kisses. A table decorated to celebrate a birthday, a good medical report, passing a test, a thoughtful meal for the feted person, the soft purr of a small cat as she sleeps on your lap. This is how poetry works; it is something beyond literal interpretation.
Finally, here’s a pocket poem in Haiku
Waiting for the snow to melt,
the tomato seed to grow
that’s more than horticulture.
