The Power of Poetry

 

A zoom-friend who lives on the west coast writes poetry and promised to read a sonnet at our next online gathering.

Do I really know what a sonnet is? I asked myself (quietly, not aloud, reluctant to display my ignorance). I might have known at one time, when studying Shakespeare in school (‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day’). But what did I really know of the rules and composition of a sonnet?

Google stepped in and informed me of sonnet rules: ABAB CDCD EFEF GG.

Why not try writing one myself?  I tried painting during the pandemic, never mind that I didn’t know acrylics from watercolours, a flat brush from a fan brush. Why not a sonnet?

I’d also recently heard on an online conference summit that poetry and laughter are two things guaranteed to engage the right brain. Not much laughing going on in the world right now. So, poetry then. In her blog Transactions With Beauty, Shawna LeMay has some links to beautiful poetry (here).

So, on an evening this week, while dinner simmered, I tried my hand at writing a sonnet (results below).

I realized I knew little about poetry. By little, I mean nothing. But I want to learn to appreciate poetry, the beauty of the rhythm and cadence of the words, the meanings within. 

Off I went to my local library to find some books on poetry. And, as sometimes happens, the first book I came across was this one: “Poetry Will Save Your Life”, a memoir by Jill Bialosky. Memoir (one of my favourite genres) and poetry rolled into one.

Bialosky writes: “Poems are composed of our own language disordered, reconfigured, reimagined, and compressed in ways that offer a heightened sense of reality and embrace a common humanity.”  She goes on to say, “Poems are a form of mythmaking, as they seek to create a unified vision of cosmic, social, and primal life order. Because of their compact and compressed form, they are immediate and intimate.”

In each chapter of her book she relates a personal story and meets that experience with poems that resonated, poems that range from Dickenson to Wordsworth. Remember “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’? Who doesn’t love those words, those images of ‘a host, of golden daffodils’. Lines of poems that I loved and repeated as a child and teenager came back to me. Maybe I did love poetry once. Maybe it’s  time to discover and love it again.

Okay, so if you’ve read this far into the post, you’ve stuck around for my feeble attempt at a sonnet, which I reveal here with a great deal of cringing. (Keep in mind that my day job is in IT, mostly logical, analytical thinking, so creative brain function may be weak or non-existent):

Time Is Fleeing

Time is fleeing, the wind keeps whispering

Unearth your dreams from where they lay buried

What is the song the morning bird doth sing?

“Dig deep, dig deep, until you find that seed.”

Remember when Knowing ushered you in?

But in between you stumbled and you fell

It was not all about the climb, the win

Shards of heart, broken parts, glimpses of hell.

In youth, wanting the river while at sea

Climbing a mountain, not seeing blue sky

Which is the way to the soul being free?

In birth we know, or was that all a lie?

   Time is passing, look back, within, ahead

   Those dreams you once had, they are not yet dead.

                                                                Pearl Richard