Poetry and the moment almost missed

Art is many things to many people, but one thing it might just do is remind us of what we would otherwise forget, or not even notice, because we’re too busy being our busy selves. Consider these lines from Jorie Graham:

I am the only one who ever lived who

remembers

my mother’s voice in the particular shadow

cast by the sky-filled Roman archway

which darkens the stones on the downward

sloping street

up which she has now come again

suddenly.

It’s a moment that only she could have seen, and which, remembering it now, she knows gave a glimpse into something bigger than we are as we walk through our days. She knows she will die one day and that this memory will be gone – and so in her poem she tries to give us a sense, a hint, of what that was. No one will ever know that moment as she did, looking at her mother. Implicit in this is a question; it asks – you’ve felt something similar too, haven’t you? And if we’re being honest we’ll answer, yes, I have, but I didn’t realize it until I read these words. The final word “suddenly” is also for us, the readers, as we open our eyes and blink at what we almost missed, forever.

Poems like this help us to treasure that most important of all sensations – that of being fully present to our world.