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| cutest swap graphic ever! |
Hello and Happy Poetry Friday! Be sure to visit Margaret at
Reflections on the Teche for Roundup.
Now that baby boy is back in school, I can start catching up! I'm excited today to share with you the first Poem Swap treasure I received this summer... from Margaret, coincidentally! But first: bushels of hugs and kisses to
Tabatha for creating and organizing the Poem Swap across the seasons! What a gift to all of us!
So. Margaret's poem was from a prompt in
THE PRACTICE OF POETRY by Robin Behn and Chase Twichell to use a Greek Philosopher's quote as an epigraph. Here is her beautiful poem (which reminds me of my "sky" year!):
Listen to the Voice of the Sky
Dark and light, bad and good, are not different but one and the same. - Heraclitus
Listen
to the voice of the sky
which knows darkness
and light
are the same.
The sky plays
with light and shadow
as a cathedral painted
in stained glass.
Look to the sky
a gauge for weather --
acceptance of rain
as necessary,
indispensable,
as grass to the cow,
as solitude to awareness,
as life is to death.
- Margaret Simon
Lovely, isn't it?! And because this is what often happens during Poem Swap, I was inspired to write my own poem with a Greek philosopher's quote as an epigraph. Some of Margaret's themes bled into my poem as well.
A Murmuration of Acceptance
One
thing I know, that I know nothing. This is the source of my wisdom. -
Socrates
The
day I learned I knew nothing,
poems
swarmed the sky,
swooped
across the sun like starlings,
as
if one body
instead
of a thrum of heartbeats,
a
frenzy of syllables,
a symphony of questions.
Nothing
settled onto my chest
like
a parched elephant,
not
moving except for that endless lake
of
skin twitching against flies,
and
a voice said, you are exactly
where you are meant to be,
and
in an instant the elephant dissolved –
all
my worries retreated
to
another kingdom,
my
carefully constructed fears
crumbled
and fell into a well
with no bucket, no rope.
I
knew nothing, but I wasn't lost.
Not
part of the flock anymore,
not even a bird or a feather
or a mite on a softly tucked wing.
Wisdom
merely a small scrawl of letters,
and
me the air a
nightingale swallows
when it sings –
not a song, no. Less than a breath,
for
those accountants among us:
breath of a breath,
that can only ever become wind
when joined by a million
other jumbled alphabets
brave enough to shape themselves
into words like nothing and forever,
before they, too, disappear.
- Irene Latham
