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...These scattered pieces of poems I’ve read or heard are all around me if I look and if I’m quiet enough to notice.
My love of poetry started with a poem I read in elementary school. It was about a brown paper bag blowing down the street in the wind. As I read the stanzas, I realized that the words went fast and then slow and rolled just as the paper bag would. It was the first time that I realized that words could do that—mimic physical movement.
It was then that I realized that words could do anything.
The poem I almost have memorized features a more sophisticated brown paper bag. It speaks to me about both life and death and the in-between. As an Idaho farm girl, I sometimes made the trek with my family to Brigham City, Utah, to buy peaches. I can almost remember sitting between my parents in the front seat of our car.
From Blossoms by Li-Young Lee
From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted Peaches.
From laden boughs, from hands,
From sweet fellowship in the bins,
Comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.
O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.
There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background, from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.
The poems I love best have simple language and speak to the most common of human experiences: life, human love, rainwater, work gloves, touch, traveling, laughing, rotting fruit, bread baking, loss, death.
Two poems aided me in grief: one for the loss of my mother; the other for my father. I have always loved best the simple words of poets like Mary Oliver, Naomi Shihab Nye, W.S. Merwin. I love the simple imagery of the scoop in the grain, the flesh of a fresh mango, a potted plant in a handbag, oil on the floor of a garage.
Poems teach us that given enough work, all hands form callouses. Poems remind us that most of us love and all of us die.
I have also learned that poems are not necessary to life. Unlike air, water, or sunshine, we can live without them. If we don’t gather them up and weave them through our minds, we go on without them. Poetry enriches. Like salt, a good poem enhances the flavor of the human experience. Treat poetry like you would a nice cool round pebble, a found feather, or a colorful strand of string.
Like seeds, when you gather poems and press them into your soul, something beautiful grows.
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