I've been wondering for some time now if I needed to get back into writing poetry. The fact that Robert Frost and Dylan Thomas have both walked onto the page in these last few days intrigues me...And then, last night, I was invited to write something to accompany an image I had shared with a friend. For some reason, I interpreted that to mean I should come up with a poem.
Although what I wrote surprised me, I came to realize that the results of my labors were expressing a sense of profound identification with the haunting sadness of dualism, as if some unseen observer could see all the ways we create our own misery; our own battlefields, both internal and external; our own sense of separation and devastation; our resentment of life's cycles and our constant longing to be other than we are.
What intrigues me more is that the words were written from the egoic point of view, whining, entitled, self-absorbed, ignorant. But the image I was writing about, like this one, spoke of another vision entirely; could step back from the ego to see both the truth of connectedness and the foolish illusions we create to keep us feeling separate and alone; the way a simple shift in perspective can reveal the tenderness and beauty that enfold us even as we weep or fight.
Does this mean that words will always keep us mired in thought -- futile, self-centered, comparing and defining -- and that it is only art that frees us to see the wholeness and connectedness of life? Then poetry would sit, like Jesus, in that in-between space, being both God and man, both connected and separate, both whole and divided, both language and art. And perhaps that's why we poets feel so stretched when we write: because we are bound to earthly images, yet always reaching for the stars...
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