Breathing Life in Slowly

April is National Poetry Month, or, as I like to call it, “Take a poet to lunch” month.   It is the month when libraries, schools, and poetry associations hold contests, readings, and celebrations of various sorts to mark the contribution of poetry to our lives.

If you’re thinking, “Who cares?” you’re in the majority. As a lover and writer of poetry, I sometimes feel discouraged by the fact that so few people value the art form. This has something to do with the way it is taught in school: badly, if at all. But the educational system simply mirrors the priorities of our society. And in a society driven by commerce, poetry is counter- cultural.

The speed of electronic media both fits and creates a hurried culture. Poetry doesn’t. No one reads a “quick poem.” Both the writing and reading of a poem require slowing down, stepping out of the current that rushes you through your day to stand on dry ground, watching and observing.

Poetry is being a child blowing on dandelion fluff for the joy of sending the seeds scattering on your breath. It’s cloud-watching, studying the pictures created in the shifting shapes. It is letting go of the impulse to control life and to become a student of it instead.

Poetry is becoming aware of your voice, your breath, the moment you are in, and everything your senses are recording in that moment. It is being  acutely aware that you are alive, with the intensity and brevity of a flaring match.

Poetry moves us, the way music moves us. It is the music of language. It reminds us of our humanness by making us feel. Entertainment distracts us, but poetry causes us to feel.

I came across this lovely poem by Yevtushenko that I first read in 1970 and copied out for my then-boyfriend, (now husband.)

Colours

When your face

appeared over my crumpled life

at first I understood

only the poverty of what I have.

Then its particular light

on woods, on rivers, on the sea,

became my beginning in the coloured world

in which I had not yet had my beginning.

I am so frightened, I am so frightened,

of the unexpected sunrise finishing,

of revelations

and tears and the excitement finishing.

I don’t fight it, my love is this fear,

I nourish it, who can nourish nothing,

love’s slipshod watchman.

Fear hems me in.

I am conscious that these minutes are short

and that the colours in my eyes will vanish

when your face sets.