Friday, August 12, 2011
Poem by Mark Nepo plus his comments on poetry
Mark Nepo on poetry
THE NECESSARY ART
(THE NATURE OF POETRY)
Poetry is the unexpected utterance of the soul. Much more than the manipulation of language, it is a necessary art by which we live and breathe. It is the art of embodied perception; a braiding of heart and mind around experience. Consider how a simple fish inhales water and somehow, mysteriously and miraculously, extracts the oxygen from the water. In doing this, it turns that water into the air by which it breathes. This ongoing inner transformation—the turning of water into air by extracting what is essential—is poetry. A much deeper process than fooling with words. For us, the heart is our gill and we must move forward into life, like simple fish, or we will die. And the mysterious yet vital way we turn experience into air, the way we extract what keeps us alive—this is the poetry of life that transcends any earthly endeavor. All this while the Universal Ground of Being we call Spirit is working its unknowable physics on us, eroding us to know that we are each other.
This Poem Should be a Circle
by Mark Nepo
I wish you the ability to breathe
after pain, to begin again, though
nothing else seems possible.
I wish you resilience: to part like
the ocean and accept like the sky,
to be held like a root.
I wish you survival: to take in life
like a trapped miner finding an
airhole and praising it as God.
I wish you courage: to ask of
everything you meet, “What
bridge are we?"
I wish you chances to listen:
to all that holds us up.
I wish you the kindness that you
are coming to brighten your face
like orange leaves scattered
at the end of fall.
I wish you endless journey that
seldom appears as we imagine.
I wish you curiosity: to make a
boat of wonder and an oar
of gratitude.
See also www.MarkNepo.com .
