If you’re one of the 3-5 people reading this blog (that’s what my WordPress stats, say, anyway), you’ve probably noticed I’ve been doing some different stuff lately. Like poetry! Good lord.
In a past life, a woman inside my head would have risen up and put the kibosh on poetry. “What are you thinking?” she would have said. “Poetry!? You, young lady, are not a poet. How dare you? YOU KNOW REAL POETS AND THEY’LL ALL LAUGH AT YOU! Quit it now before you embarrass yourself!”
This woman, who has figured more prominently in my mental tableaux than I’d like to admit, spends most of her time warning me not to embarrass myself. The result, generally, is that I spend huge swaths of time riding the embarrassment escalator up and down between “mildly self-conscious” on mezzanine and “mortally mortified” up in major appliances and underwear.
So, yeah. She can be quiet now. I’ve been writing poetry. And you know what? I like it. It’s fun, even if it’s not good. And maybe some of it is good! After all, 3-5 people generally glance at it on a semi-weekly basis. They don’t send me hate mail. Maybe I’m an undiscovered poetic genius.
Or maybe I’m just having fun. Either is good with me. I don’t need to be discovered.
You may also have noticed that some of the poems (and those half-prose, half-poem things that I don’t know what they are) haven’t exactly been light and cheery, and, well…that’s a thing, too. I think probably part of me is working through the grief over my dad’s death. I think another part is responding to something my friend Linda sent before writing group one week — “art should be dangerous.” I read that and thought, yeah, OK. Let’s go.
But this, my friends, (readers? Three to Five People Who Glance?), this is not art. This is just me talking, as I started talking last November, in that little experiment called 500 Words Before Bedtime. Tonight, driving home from a church thing, I had an urge to do that again. To put down thoughts at the end of the day without effort or artifice; to speak something that is unvarnished, that lacks metaphor.
So I thought I’d write this. I might write more tomorrow. I might tell you a little bit about how, after listening to The Interior Castle on Audible before bed, I was inspired to pick up the gospels. How, opening to the story of The Good Samaritan I found myself intrigued by the wording of those two greatest commandments — Love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your strength, and love your neighbor as yourself. I might write for a little while about how I wondered what the difference was, really, between my heart and my soul, and how it was (really) that I was meant to love with them.
And I might tell you how I remembered then the homily given at my father’s funeral, when the priest read from 1 Corinthians — Love is patient, love is kind — and said it was, chapter and verse, all about dad. I might tell you how I thought that there are worse places to start than patience and how I have been meditating on what it means to make your soul patient; what, further, it means, to have patience with God…but not tonight. Tonight I just felt like writing a little bit, unvarnished. The rest is for tomorrow.
Oh! And I spend multiple minutes trying to find these damned “featured images.” Tonight you get Pete, who’s tired and wants to go to bed.