The first time I was called a poet, I took offense,
for poetry is good for nothing: it neither
makes love nor wages war, nor pays the bills. Poetry
is a fossil record, is the hope that elegizing a shadow
will re-animate the object that casts it; and poets are
archeologists who spend a lifetime scribbling in the soil
because worms are sacred and reviled. Poetry
is a child in bed, the lights out, projecting a cosmos
onto the ceiling; his parents fretting over the state
of the world; all the people he may or may not meet
longing like atoms of ice for love to free them of their
loneliness; the heat that sears and the cold that burns;
the agony and the aloe.
But poetry is where I go to right the wrongs of the day:
the faucet that, resisting my wrench, drips on; the box
of Mac & Cheese left in the cart, my son chiding me
for forgetting it; the half-read page, sock that failed
to make it to the wash; toys not put away, lying in wait
like a landmine in one of those wars you see on TV
while eating dinner, earth stained with blood and laundry
stuffed to the brim…Poetry is our only hope for life,
for there is no God, and the Word begins with Us.
