Ann W.

I will tell you where the poetry hides.

Will you? Don’t tell me that it’s in the dark green mountains rising like majestic giants above the sapphire seas or in the rolling wind-tossed meadows under the rosy summer dawn. I’ve never seen those things and I don’t believe that they exist - except in people’s minds, as images digitally enhanced, artificially colored and flavored, to perfection.

A poem hides in the fall of a single autumn leaf into the street.

Don’t tell me to look at the leaves in fall. For thousands of years they have fallen; for equally long man has composed poetry about them. They have been drained dry.

The man that writes those poems has not been drained or even fathomed. Once the leaves hold no more interest for him, he turns to higher things.

Then look at the people walking through life before you. Poetry hides within their joys and sorrows. It writes itself on their faces and in their hands.

Don’t ask me about the ‘higher things’ of our souls either, about ecstasy or despair, sacrifice or redemption. Those words belong to the epics, adventures and the golden heroes of centuries past. Any poetry hiding in them is long since lost to me. I don’t believe in fairy tales. I believe in chewing gum and soda pop. My sorrow is a late night’s worth of homework and my joy is candy at Halloween, new video games at Christmas. Poetry is not worth finding if it dwells in high-soaring sentiments that I can only pretend to feel and pretend to understand.

There is a poem in the darkest hour of your night, when everything fades away except the terrible shadow that is falling down to crush you and the black sea that is rising up to drown you—the darkness of all the things you failed to do today and of all the things you will fail to do tomorrow.

But there are no words in that darkness.

You must keep listening.

It would have nothing profound to say to me. The sufferings of humanity in this base and imperfect world, with its starving orphans and its dying mothers, do not make up the greatest weight of my shadows. The petty things anger and hurt me the most:  a bungled test, a word clumsily dropped in the wrong place, a promise forgotten.

Nevertheless there is poetry in your pain.

But how can I find it? Digging at scars to look for poems would make them bleed—and if one bleeds in public everyone turns to stare…Don’t discuss pain with me, for what do I know about it? If I tried to talk of suffering and grief with anyone they would laugh at me, and ask me just that. For pain has already been found, in the pens and on the paper of hundreds of thousands of strangers, older and wiser and nobler, before me.

They were mortal and their words are mortal. New scribes are needed all the time to record the human experience again, generation after generation, so that we might not forget. A poem hides in the smile of the awkward stranger whose pencil you found on the floor. A poem hides in walking home as it snows. A poem hides in the taste of the first apple of October and in the sound of rain on the pavement at midnight.

But these things have no words. I search and I search and the only words I find fit but awkwardly—like second-hand clothes. I wish and I plead and no answers are granted me. My journey of discovery does not lead to enlightenment. It blunders back and forth in darkness and eventually comes by a circle back to my questions.

There hides poetry in the asking, poetry in the seeking, poetry in the yearning. The journey gives body and life to the poem, the answer merely the last line. You must keep searching. That, perhaps, is the only answer there is.

Then—what of your original proposition?

I think I was mistaken. I do not after all possess the ability to tell you the secret of where the poetry hides, nor you the ability to understand me. You must go out and find it yourself.