poetry pocket: you reading this, be ready, william stafford
will you ever bring a better gift for the world than the breathing respect that you carry wherever you go right now?
dear little voice,
i confess i feel the same sense of awe when i contemplate a word as i do when i contemplate the pyramids.
Ilya Kaminsky wrote: we sleep in a language until it comes to wake us with its strangeness.
Franz Kafka believed that True Books are an axe to the frozen sea of the mind.
Roland Barthes searched for the ‘punctum’ in all Art— or: its fragment that strikes the audience in the most inexplicable but ultimately unbearably necessary way.
how magnificent: that this delicious impracticality exists. that there are people behind their windows conspiring each day to shepherd you toward amazement. that they go to such lengths to draw your attention to your dreams… to— somehow— achieve that enviable tear in the veil.
that spiked daze of awe. that slowing of the blood. the sheer, gentle alarm of having been moved— and, somehow, unexpectedly awakened and cured. like a peeling of ginger beneath the tongue on an unsteady road-trip.
it is the feeling Nietzsche called the ‘long bright silence of Before,’ in which we suddenly stand in awe before everything that was and always has been there, waiting— before the long and the bright and the generous and the forgotten.
little voice, the world is beautiful and we are alive but sometimes we forget. that is why we need words.
We die on the day when our lives cease to be illumined by the steady radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder, the source of which is beyond all reason.
- Dag Hammarskj
our fate, like the fate of all species, is determined by our instinct for attention.
the writer Terry Tempest Williams writes of the vitality of being receptive to awe:
“What we mistake as sentimental is in fact a generosity, a willingness to stay open and acknowledge the miraculous. […] Our fear of being touched removes us from a sensate world. The distant self becomes the detached self who no longer believes in anything. Awe is the moment when ego surrenders to wonder. This is our inheritance — the beauty before us. We cry. We cry out. There is nothing sentimental about facing the desert bare. It is a terrifying beauty.But inward grows a soberness, an awe. “
as Stafford writes in A Living:
and you can take that long brightish silence with you, wherever you go on your road.
you only need a tiny box:
“When there was air, when you could breathe any day if you liked, and if you wanted to you could run. I used to climb those hills back of town and follow a gully so my eyes were at ground level and could look out through grass as the stems bent in their tensile way, and see snow mountains follow along, the way distance goes. Now I carry those days in a tiny box wherever I go, I open the lid like this and let the light glimpse and then glance away. There is a sigh like my breath when I do this. Some days I do this again and again.”
- Remembering, William Stafford
and you can start, little voice, with water:
“Now has come, an easy time. I let it roll. There is a lake somewhere so blue and far nobody owns it. A wind comes by and a willow listens gracefully.
I hear all this, every summer. I laugh and cry for every turn of the world, its terribly cold, innocent spin. That lake stays blue and free; it goes on and on.
And I know where it is.”
and it can happen at any time.
love,
ars poetica.
little voice: it is my belief that Poetry is a human birthright. my work will always be completely free, and takes considerable Time and Love to give to you several days a week. if it has brought you Joy, consider buying me a book so that I may continue to tuck Words in your pocket:
Please think about this as you go on. Breathe on the world. Hold out your hands to it. When morning and evenings roll along, watch how they open and close, how they invite you to the long party that your life is.
Thank you.
thank you so much for your care and respect for the words... medicine right now...