Poetry Appreciation Month

I’ve never really appreciated poetry, mainly because of bad flashbacks from Mr. Emma’s High School English class.  He made a valiant effort to get his students to appreciate Dickinson and Walt Whitman, however, it didn’t stick.  Hindsight says that I was too young and too inexperienced to understand the depth of emotion and nuance poetry represents.  For twenty years, I’ve been perfectly fine walking the earth claiming that I just don’t get poetry.  However, as with many things, it is about time and place.  A few weeks ago, while wandering around the library stacks, I came across Rumi.  I immediately remembered, in a weird and intensely exciting flashback, that I loved Rumi when I first read his poems as an Undergrad.

I picked up The Essential Rumi and skimmed through it.  Every page I flipped to resonated something in me.  His simple verse, written beautifully (mind you it’s translated) is full of emotion and passion that you can’t help but connect with his poems. I realized that poetry can be meaningful and touching and I don’t need to be an expert to connect with it.

In that vein, in July, I’ll randomly put up a few verses/poems that touch me.

MY WORST HABIT

My worst habit is I get so tired of winter

I become a torture to those I’m with.

If you’re not here, nothing grows.

I lack clarity. My words

tangle and knot up.

How to cure bad water? Send it back to the river.

How to cure bad habits? Send me back to you.

When water gets caught in habitual whirlpools,

dig a way out through the bottom

to the ocean. There is a secret medicine

given only to those who hurt so hard

they can’t hope.

The hopers would feel slighted if they knew.

Look as long as you can at the friend you love,

no matter whether that friend is moving away from you

or coming back toward you.

Soure: The Essential Rumi translated by Coleman Barks with John Moyne, Harper San Francisco, c1995, p. 52.

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