April 2

 

April: National Poetry Month

 

I love poetry for its ability to put into words things that I feel and see and touch and sometimes have no other way of expressing.

I love it for making words beautiful, for using beautiful words.

Poetry tells of stories, of whispers, of  thoughts, of pictures, of the way morning fog collects over rivers, of the way raindrops mirror the world in their tiny pools, of the way people laugh and cry and hope and die together, alone.

Good poetry, always in a few perfect lines.

 

So April, a poem a day.

 

* * *

 

The Journey

 

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice-
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations, though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen branches and stones.
but little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do-
determined to save
the only life you could save.

- Mary Oliver