The Magic of Poetry

Such contention these days out in the world, and even worse, beginning to settle into our hearts. The players on the big political stage announce their sweeping agendas, with not a single nod to the sacredness peering out from the landscape, or back at them through the eyes of human and more-than-human creatures, sentient and otherwise. And, we, forgetting the most basic understanding of reality - that we are all connected one to the other - sometimes respond poorly. “Everything is weird, and everyone is wrecked,” writes activist Rebecca Solnit. I think that about covers it.

Here is where poetry steps in to offer solace and pull us back to our more noble selves. It holds no allegiance to our petty squabbles, does not align with any ideology other than its devotion to the fullness of life, leaning as it does past what is, to what might yet be. It illuminates new pathways, offers up fresh possibilities where we can only see dead ends. Its language gifts us a burst of beauty in the midst of the pedantic drone of commercial messaging, the oppressive agenda of avarice on all fronts.

Reading poetry, writing poetry, listening to it being read, grants us a rest, grants us a small window of peacefulness, breath, and spaciousness.

Listen. Rest. Be restored. Step out of your own story, and into someone else’s.

 Autumn Funeral, Poet, Candice Bist

She arrives at the church door in disarray 

her grey brown hair a wild straggle 

her face uncertain, the mark of lost battles upon it.  

She has come fresh from the meadow she tends,  

her arms gathered around a cloud of Michaelmas Daisies  

the purple glory of Canadian autumn roadsides. 

They too are a wild straggle, but so effusive,  

as is her apology, for simply showing up, unannounced,  

to say, mostly in words unspoken,  

so sorry. . . . but here, here are my flowers  

they are beautiful and they are what I have to give.  

I can’t stay, there is no place for me here, really, but,  

so sorry. . . . . 

I gather the bounty of purple blue into my arms, 

words too cumbersome for such sacredness  

and she disappears down the steps.  

I notice sometime later,  

with the church filled to the brim  

with staged and ticketed conceits from the florist shop, 

the daisies are nowhere to be seen. 

I find them in a forgotten corner of the basement kitchen,  

jammed in an odd piece of crockery,  

iridescent still, not minding their aloneness,  

glowing in the surety of their place in this world. 

And I loved them for their humility. And I loved their giver too.