3 posts tagged “poetry”
I discovered this gem in an old issue of The New Yorker. I was inspired and silenced by its beauty. I am thus compelled to share it here.
Anonymous Poet
by Stanley MossSometimes I would see her with her lovers
walking through the Village, the wind
strapped about her ankles.
Simply being, she fought
against the enemies of love and poetry
like Achilles in wrath.
Her tongue was not a lake,
but it lifted her lovers
with the gentle strength of a lake
that lifts a cove of waterlilies--
her blue eyes, the sky above them--
till night fell and the mysteries began.
My friend I love, poet I love,
if you are not reading or writing tonight
on your Underwood typewriter,
if no one is kissing you, death is real.
I just found the most awe-inspring thing on YouTube. Magical, haunting, and surreal. Listen to it and be stirred.
I remember once telling a faraway writer friend of mine that every sentence he made on paper was poetry (it wasn't, it was science fiction). And in my mind, he was poetry with a heartbeat. I also thought at that time that life was poetry because I thought it was so beautiful. I just loved to describe everything as poetry, because poems are things I equated with veins in the body; alive, the heart at the center.
Do you know what? I've changed my mind about what life is. Life is not beautiful. It can be, but it isn't all the time; life isn't poetry all the time. Sometimes it's a brain fart, a nonsensical rant. Other times it feels like a put-down or a rejection letter. On good days, it goes back to being poetry, but if anything, life -- I should say life for a writer -- is a collection of words put together to simply express it.
So when there are no words to express it at all, what do we do? I would rather understand something for what it is than leave the words floating above my brain or trapped behind my lips. Since I can't always get what I want, Mick Jagger, here's a poem about something on my mind, not about me, not about anyone in particular but about something popularized by cartoons on cereal boxes and mass continental hysteria: the bee.
