Wednesday, April 2, 2014

Celebrating National Poetry Month!




So, April is National Poetry Month!  Poetry is such a part of me.  I love to read it, write it, and teach it.   Yes, I'm all in here for the poetry celebration.  

This month on this blog, I'd like to highlight poetry in weekly posts. Today, I'm giving you a poem I wrote about being a poet, a poem by John Leax on writing, and links to some of the poems by other people already on my blogs. Other weeks this month I might repost one of my original poems or one of my articles on teaching poetry.  I may even write a new one!

Meanwhile, here we go with what I've got for you this week.


"In the Poet's Realm"
by Virginia Knowles, 2011

In the poet’s realm today, almost
Lingering on the threshold yet unsure of my welcome
Meter and rhyme still bend not, bow not before my pen
I am not one who writes or thinks or lives in tidy rows
Yet I am as a stranger in a foreign land
Thirsting to hear my native tongue in a different voice
My ears quicken; in relief, I spurtle a reply
A cry to be heard and understood
In the communion of poets
In the creative conversation

For I have no wish to join 
   the company of sharp-tongued prophets
The poets are my kindred, at least in my aspirations
Yet perhaps poets are prophets, too, of sorts
With gentle images of beauty or haunting tales of woe
Piercing the heart
Softening the soul
Lifting each to a deeper Communion and
A creative conversation with the Creator Himself
Who hears and understands
No matter how skilled the tongue or pen.



"What I Have Found"
by John R. Leax
from his book Grace is Where I Live
This place that claims my midlife
labor is not an Eden I have made.
It is a place of trial.
My hope resides in yielding
to what calls me still to stay.
No charming serpent curls
about my arm and whispers
in my ear.  But I am tempted
nonetheless.  Like Homer
I take the stories of my people,
I give them shape, and hand
them down.  What I pass on
is truth made new--half-truth
spun through kind invention.
The world I make is finer
than the world I know.  How else
contain the bitterness, the pain,
the grief?  I have not lied.
I say my words; I seek
the wholeness of the world.
Like Homer I am blind.
I see what is not here.
I see this place by word
and grace a new creation.
That word is what I've found.
That grace is where I live.




Links to several poems already on my blogs...

Peace and poetry,
Virginia Knowles


P.S. The hibiscus photo is from the Winter Park Sidewalk Art Festival last month. Same flower, edited for neon and heat map different effects.  Just a different way of seeing!  Could we call it "phoetry"?

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