'Feeling experience and pressing it further'

 

“Onereason to write a poem is to flush from the deep thickets of the self somethought, feeling, comprehension, question, music, you didn't know was in you,or in the world.” Jane Hirshfield

Poetand essayist Hirshfield, born in New York in February of 1953, is the author of10 poetry collections, including this past year’s The Asking: New and Selected Poems.  Each has earned numerous awards as has her highlyregarded book of essays about poetry, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind ofPoetry.   

                                            

 “My job as a human being as well as a writeris to feel as thoroughly as possible the experience that I am part of, and thenpress it a little further,” she said.   ForSaturday’s poem here is Hirshfield’s,

 

 

ChangingEverything

I was walking again
in the woods,
a yellow light
was sifting all I saw.

Willfully,
with a cold heart,
I took a stick,
lifted it to the opposite side
of the path.

There, I said to myself,
that's done now.
Brushing one hand against the other,
to clean them
of the tiny fragments of bark.

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