Each morning, after waking and taking care of my ablutions, I do these things: I return to bed and do some lying-down stretches. Next, I get out of bed and do some standing-up stretches.
Then comes the good part.
I sit on the edge of my bed and pull out one of the books of poetry that lives on the shelf in my bedside table. With pleasant anticipation, I open the book at random and read a poem. Sometimes two or three, if I am not feeling too eager to get to my first cup of tea.
After this, I spend a few minutes meditating and/or praying (after a fashion).
Each part of this routine is important to me, but today I want to focus on the reading-a-poem part.
A poem is, for me, the perfect reading material for early morning. It is such a compact pleasure. So much wisdom or beauty or humor or pick-an-emotion packed into a few lines or pages. Truly a poem goes straight to the heart of the matter, whatever the matter may be.
And there’s this: First thing in the morning, my brain is not yet fully online. And, where poetry is concerned, that is just fine. Although my brain is engaged when I read a poem, it is not taking the lead. I more inhabit a poem than think about it. In fact, too much thinking can sometimes ruin the experience. Often the only approach is to let the poem wash over the heart and soul and see what is left behind. What could be more suitable for the half-awake spirit?
I guess it isn’t surprising that I choose to start each day this way, for I can’t remember a time when I didn’t love poetry. As a child, I poured over a collection for young people – Its title is lost to me, but I can clearly see its blue cover and black spine. I thrilled to "The Highwayman” (Alfred Noyes), mesmerized by the bravery of Bess, the landlord’s black-eyed daughter, who gave her life to warn her true love of his impending arrest, and “Sea Fever” (John Masefield), which gave voice to my love of the ocean.
In high school, I discovered Robert Frost (“Some say the world will end in fire/Some say in ice.”) and Emily Dickinson (“I’m nobody! Who are you?/Are you – Nobody – too?”) And then in college I discovered the English Romantics. The words of these men, almost all of whom died young, suited my sense of the dramatic. I remember a day when I wandered the campus, desperate to find someone who might appreciate these lines from Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind”:
As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.
Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!
I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!
As I said, these were my dramatic years . . .
As I awoke to feminism’s second wave, I turned from the drama of the English Romantics to that of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. (OK, so I was smitten with depressives.) And I returned to Emily Dickinson as salve for a broken heart: “After great pain a formal feeling comes --”
I also fell for e .e. cummings and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, John Donne and Theodore Roethke. During these years, I memorized yards of poetry – not on purpose, but as a side-effect of returning to favorites again and again. Here are a few lines from Roethke’s The Waking,” a poem etched on my heart to this day:
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.
We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
As the years went by, I discovered Adrienne Rich and and William Stafford, Denise Levertov and W. S. Merwin, Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon, Maya Angelou and Rita Dove -- and so many more.
Now, in addition to whatever I open to in the morning, my taste runs to Rumi and Mary Oliver. I repeatedly return to John O’Donohue’s To Bless the Space Between Us and Stephen Mitchell’s translation of The Tao te Ching.
The poets have changed over the years, but the pleasure remains the same.
A twin to the pleasure of reading poetry is that of writing it. In high school, I wrote a few tentative poems. Then, in college, the dam burst. I wrote things like this (note, if you will, the cummings-influenced disdain for upper case):
eyes
are the dwelling place
of truth (all
other sites –
after careful consideration –
having been dismissed
as unrealistic).
for
smiles are only
paste-on things
to be purchased
by politicians
ad men and the like
for the deliberate
pursuit of deception,
and
words are oftentimes
subverted
by acts of awful treachery
while masquerading as
harbingers of love.
let others gather smiles and words
in bouquets of self-deception
i shall always listen for the truth in eyes.
And that should hold us on the subject of my youthful poetry. I gave up the practice for a good long while, and then took it up again in late middle age. Now I write things like this:
GRATITUDE
This morning on my walk
I thanked each tree
for holding up the sky.
I thanked each bird
for splitting infinity
as it larked across my view.
I thanked January daffodils
for the startling audacity
of their faces against the fog.
And I thanked creation
for eyes and ears and tongue
with which to praise.
There is solace for me in writing such lines, in gathering my feelings into words. Reading and writing poetry, I feel I am swimming against the current of endless noise and distraction that drowns out the soul’s voice, and finding my way to a quiet spot, where I may spend some time exploring the mystery at the core of our lives.
Having, I think, taken enough of your time, I will leave you with these lines from Mary Oliver’s “Dogfish”:
You don’t want to hear the story
of my life, and anyway
I don’t want to tell it, I want to listen
to the enormous waterfalls of the sun.
And anyway it’s the same old story – – –
a few people just trying,
one way or another,
to survive.
Mostly, I want to be kind.
And nobody, of course, is kind,
or mean,
for a simple reason.
And nobody gets out of it, having to
swim through the fires to stay in
this world.
May the fires of which she speaks burn away all that interferes with our true paths through this world. And may you, too, find solace in poetry as you make your way along your path.
