FOR POETS AND DREAMERS

Welcome to Poetry Friday Roundup!!

It's such a pleasure to host, and thanks as ever to Mary Lee at A Year of Reading for always putting out the call and providing the code and basically making Poetry Friday easy-easy so we can all focus on the joy we find in poetry.

What have I been doing so far this new year? Well, reading. A lot. As in a mad frenzy of reading to be ready for next Monday's Newbery Award announcement.

One of the titles I adored was this one, THE DREAMER by Pam Munoz Ryan and Peter Sis, about young Pablo Neruda -- before he called himself Pablo Neruda! What a beautiful book, and what a hopeful story for anyone who has felt a parent doesn't approve of one's life choices.

Of course, I love Neruda's poems. No poet writes so beautifully about love. And this little book illuminated the roots of that poetry. So today, for the first Poetry Friday of 2011, I offer you this poem:

YOU WILL REMEMBER

You will remember that leaping stream
where sweet aromas rose and trembled,
and sometimes a bird, wearing water
and slowness, its winter feathers.
You will remember those gifts from the earth:
indelible scents, gold clay,
weeds in the thicket and crazy roots,
magical thorns like swords.
You'll remember the bouquet you picked,
shadows and silent water,
bouquet like a foam-covered stone.
That time was like never, and like always.
So we go there, where nothing is waiting;
we find everything waiting there.

- Pablo Neruda