Yesterday I was listening to NRP on the way to church. On Being was the program that was being aired. The guest of the day was Elizabeth Alexander, the poet who read a poem at Obama's inauguration in 2009. Now, poetry isn't something I naturally get, but I've been more intentional as of late to read poetry regularly. What Alexander said in this program explained why. She said that when she writes poetry it's all intuition. When she stood up to do a sound check at the inauguration, she recited a poem about building apartments in Chicago, and the crowd grew silent. It wasn't Alexander's voice that silenced them, but the words they were hearing. It's as if their beings were longing for what their brains couldn't give them, words set in poetry that communicated what they knew only in their guts to be true. Words that affect.
My bedtime reading changed in the fall and winter of this last year, to no longer be of novels that allowed me to leave my reality, but instead novels and memoirs whose words aroused affect. The words on the pages read more like poetry, and they felt true, and more then once I wept because I felt known in the words.
So, here's a poem, a haiku, because it's one form of poetry that I'm able to easily write.
Beautiful woman,
not because of how she looks;
much deeper within
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