Short.
Simple.
Speaking directly to my soul.
I love them.
Poetry has a bad rap and I get it…when I went through school I hated poetry as much as the next student. I didn’t get and we had to talk about it…and talk about it….and talk about it… It was in one such discussion during college that I discovered my favorite poem, “The Rose” by William Blake is about venereal diseases…so yeah poetry is weird and hard and yet…it feeds my soul.
I’ve gotten in the habit of picking up short little books of modern poetry. They take a matter of hours to read and almost always by the end of them, whether they were good or not, I find a moment of wholeness. The beauty and healing power of poetry for me is in the simplicity, the just sitting in the words and if meaning comes great, if not that’s fine too. Just dwelling in each word on the page, in the white space and the line breaks. Poetry becomes an incarnate, whole body experience of being present to language and ideas and emotion. Today in the wake of Ash Wednesday and another school shooting it’s in the spaces and words of poetry I find my soul again.
I know, I know…it’s all a little touchy feely, hippy-dippy, but if you are someone who longs to stop thinking and simply experience language, if you need a moment, a break from the ever present “talk” (yes, I realize the irony of this) that inundates our lives, then you might be ready to give poetry a try and nazanin marsadeghi’s “a jarful of moonlight” is a wonderful collection. A great place to start or continue your poetic journey 😉
Happy reading!
