Dear Reader,
Happy Valentine’s Day! And what better day than today to focus on love?
I love poetry, and I rediscovered that love over the weekend. Louise and I went on an overnight trip to an old country inn here in Shetland. Upon arrival, the innkeeper served us tea and heart-shaped shortbread cookies (homemade!) in a reading room with overstuffed chairs, a fireplace at each end and shelves of books in between. “The Spirit Level,” a book of poems by Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney caught my eye…
The first poem I turned to was “The Swing,” and after the first three lines, I was in love with poetry all over again:
“Fingertips just tipping you would send you
Every bit as far – once you got going –
As a big push in the back.”
Don’t those lines also describe the spiritual journey perfectly? At first, perhaps, we need a big push to help us get started, but once we get going, it takes much lighter guidance to help us along our way.
Somehow, over the last year, I fell out of the practice of reading poetry. I love to read it out loud, preferably to Louise because she loves to be read to. But even if I’m alone, I love reading a good poem aloud, feeling and hearing my voice – which somehow helps me feel the movement of the poem.
When I read “The Swing” that afternoon, something tender opened deep inside me, some intersection of memory, movement, play and delight that cannot be described in words. If asked to explain further, all I could really do would be to read you the poem, and even then…
So 2011 is the year I have rediscovered poetry.
What love might you rediscover this year, dear reader, that has been lingering in your past, waiting just for you?
I honor your loving heart,
John
Happy Valentines Day!
This poem caught my eye this morning…it was posted on the Writers Almanac….
For You, Friend
by Ted Kooser
this Valentine’s Day, I intend to stand
for as long as I can on a kitchen stool
and hold back the hands of the clock,
so that wherever you are, you may walk
even more lightly in your loveliness;
so that the weak, mid-February sun
(whose chill I will feel from the face
of the clock) cannot in any way
lessen the lights in your hair, and the wind
(whose subtle insistence I will feel
in the minute hand) cannot tighten
the corners of your smile. People
drearily walking the winter streets
will long remember this day:
how they glanced up to see you
there in a storefront window, glorious,
strolling along on the outside of time.
“For You, Friend”, by Ted Kooser, from Valentines. © University of Nebraska Press, 2008. Reprinted with permission.
Ahhhh, that’s beautiful. Thank you Celeste; that’s what the Comment feature is all about! I hope your week has been filled with poetry…
John