World Poetry Day

It is easier to say what poetry shouldn’t do than what it should.

It cannot teach you to distinguish right from wrong: reading a poem implies that you understand it anyway (would you care is a whole other question). If it makes you sentimental, you are reading a bad one: sudden tears in your eyes would appear for no obvious reason in many other cases, too.

But if you read it once in your childhood and come back to the same lines again and again when you are happy or dismayed;

If you heard the fragment and then would try as hard as you could to find the rest;

if you remember it by heart just like that, without a special effort on your side;

if you mumble it in order to persevere when you are feeling your lowest

—then, it is poetry. Don’t forget and enjoy.

Happy World Poetry Day.

***

Time and the bell have buried the day,

The black cloud carries the sun away.

Will the sunflower turn to us, will the clematis

Stray down, bend to us; tendril and spray

Clutch and cling?

Chill

Fingers of yew be curled

Down on us? After the kingfisher's wing

Has answered light to light, and is silent, the light is still

At the still point of the turning world. ©