Saturday's Poem: Poetry

Edvard Munch - "The Kiss (On the Shore)", 1921

I've been reading poems a lot lately and thinking about the importance of poetry in our lives. In fact, I had an email exchange on the subject with one of our steadfast readers, David Shearer, who called my attention to this article that appeared in the New York Times last week. So for today's poem, a poem about poetry by one of my personal favorite and most oft-quoted poets, William Stafford. Yeah, him again. His wisdom resonates.

Oh...as for the image, it's a painting by Edvard Munch I saw recently at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and there are many ways of seeing it, as I realized at the time, jotting down my impressions. (I suppose I could write a blog post all its own about it and it might reveal more about me than the painting.) But for here, let us notice how those two figures hold onto each other despite a sense of everything being unreal. Poetry and love can be that way.

Poetry by William Stafford

Its door opens near. It’s a shrine
by the road, it’s a flower in the parking lot
of The Pentagon, it says, “Look around,
listen. Feel the air.” It interrupts
international telephone lines with a tune.
When traffic lines jam, it gets out
and dances on the bridge. If great people
get distracted by fame they forget
this essential kind of breathing
and they die inside their gold shell.
When caravans cross deserts
it is the secret treasure hidden under the jewels.

Sometimes commanders take us over, and they
try to impose their whole universe,
how to succeed by daily calculation:
I can’t eat that bread. 

 William Stafford,  The Way It Is.