Let poetry feed your soul

A writer gives.
A writer gives time, energy, and thought to a story.
A writer gives memories, emotion, and imagination to a story.
A writer gives words, sentences, and paragraphs to a story.
A writer gives a piece of their soul to a story.

But you can only give if you receive.
You need to feed your soul.

A writer feeds their soul in a lot of ways.
Listening. Watching. Learning.
Music. Books. Nature.
Stop. Be. Breathe.

I have made a rather recent discovery, a new font of inspiration and restoration — poetry. In high school, I loathed it. In college, I suffered it. In adult life, I ignored it.

When I turned 50, I discovered it.

I just Googled “poetry definition,” and found this, courtesy of some teachers of online education from Kentucky:

“A literary expression in which words are used in a concentrated blend of sound and imagery to create an emotional response.”

That’s a good place to start when thinking about poetry as a resource to feed your soul.

Poetry is a literary expression, which means when you read it, you are trafficking in the world of creative writing.

Poetry uses words, which means when you read it, you are experiencing how others use a writer’s most fundamental tool.

Poetry is sound and imagery, which means when you read it, you enter into a realm of sensation and visualization.

Poetry is about emotional response, which means when you read it, you can be touched, moved, replenished.

And perhaps most importantly, poetry is a wonderful form of storytelling.

Like this poem by Billy Collins.

“The Lanyard”

The other day I was ricocheting slowly
off the blue walls of this room,
moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano,
from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,
when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary
where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.

No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one into the past more suddenly-
a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp
by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid long thin plastic strips
into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.

I had never seen anyone use a lanyard
or wear one, if that’s what you did with them,
but that did not keep me from crossing
strand over strand again and again
until I had made a boxy
red and white lanyard for my mother.

She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.

She nursed me in many a sick room,
lifted spoons of medicine to my lips,
laid cold face-cloths on my forehead,
and then led me out into the airy light
and taught me to walk and swim,
and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.

Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.

Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.

And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift-not the worn truth
that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hand,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.

UPDATE: John (Out Of Context) shared this poem (originally in Sanskrit) in comments:

A ray is caught in a bowl,
And the cat licks it, thinking that it’s milk;
Another threads its way through tree-branches,
And the elephant thinks he has found a lotus-stalk.
Half asleep, a girl reaches out
And tries to rearrange the moonbeams on the bed
To share the warmth.
It is the moon that is drunk with its own light,
But the world is confused.

It’s like the perfect poem for the traditional idea of Protagonist transformation, where the P begins the story with their Ordinary World knowledge, then gets thrust into the Extraordinary World of adventure, and through all those Act Two experience begins to learn the ‘wisdom’ to understand how they were ‘confused’ in their old world, and now begins to see the light for what it is. And, of course, the light was within them all the time.

Thanks, John. That poem is a keeper.

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