A Poem For Wednesday: Postscript

Poetry is like breathing. It happens all the time. Poetry is life. Poetry celebrates life. It is life as seen through the prism of another's thoughts, of their process of thinking. Poetry doesn't give answers. It asks questions but the answers are elusive. But in the poetry, in these questions, these perspectives, we find ways of coping, ways of venting, ways of release from all the vicissitudes that life presents us with.

Your Voice Was Smooth; Like Water Running Over Rocks

24" x 36" x 1.5"

Oil and Mixed on Canvas

This painting is currently on display at The Blues Jean Bar in Snider Plaza

Postscript

And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
so that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,
their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you'll park and capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffeings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.


In college I took a course in Irish Literature. It was a course for Lit Majors but I took it anyway. One day my professor said "The finest poet writing in the English language today is Seamus Heaney."  That was the first I heard his name, over 30 years ago. With Heaney, I found a poet who engaged me in a constant conversation. Each poem was a kind of search, an examination of life and at the same time witness to life.