Poetry Re-Visited

The full moon energy still stimulating my mind deeper into the night than as is customary, I went to the garage and dug out books - poetry anthologies, mostly, and a few journals that I hadn't visited for quite some time.

I love poetry. I have since my teen years been particularly fond of women poets from around the world. As I leaf through these familiar friends, as I've done so many times over the years, I am harkened back to a lush landscape of memories. Different colored pens which underlined favorite quotations. Initials of friends and lovers who had come to mind while passing through...

(to C.E.A.)

"I know a man who reads all inscriptions on ancient stones

and who knows the grammars of all languages, dead or alive,

but who cannot read the eyes of a woman whom he thinks he loves."

(to C.L.F.)

"...I nearly collapsed, I almost wiped myself out like a stain

I called for you and you came..."

(to S.A.T.)

"... I want what world there is behind your eyes,

I want your life and you will not give it me."

(to J.D.F.)

"Si se estrechan las manos, si se abraza,

nunca es para apartarse,

es porque el alma ciegamente siente

que la forma posible de estar juntos

es una despedida larga, clara.

Y que lo mas seguro es el adios."

So many books, so many years. Lines as familiar to me as the ones on the palms of my hands. Phrases which evoke a stabbing recollection. Full stanzas that my mind accompanies with melody, in song.

"I love a man who is not worth my love.

Did this happen to your mother?

Did your sister throw up a lot?"

Poems of experiences I've never had, yet are bought to life in their weaving, and evoke emotions terrible and turbulent in me:

"Abortions will not let you forget.

You remember the children you got that you did not get...

I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed children...

Believe me, I loved you all.

Believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I loved, I loved you

All."

Poems which I've read before, enjoyed and scribbled at, which in re-reading now reveal to me a new face, born of more recent and relevant life events...

"How I miss my father!...

Now I look and cook just like him:

my brain light;

tossing this and that into the pot;

seasoning none of my life the same way twice;

happy to feed whoever strays my way.

He would have grown to admire

the woman I've become:

cooking, writing, chopping wood,

staring into the fire."

Amazing... two hours have nearly passed like the blink of an eye!

Fair enough... I'll leave off here for this morning, with a deep curtsey of genuine gratitude to Shadab Vajdi, Michele Roberts, Charlotte Mew, Pedro Salinas, Alice Walker, and Gwendolyn Brooks.

The rest I'll save for another day.