What is Poetry? What Does it Mean To You?

Perhaps it is time for this? Perhaps it is time for something I haven’t written yet and might never write . . . What is Poetry? What Does It Mean To You?

Rudwulf’s “Visiting a Poem” slid between my solar plexis and my throat with a resounding thunk. Truth. Does it tell ALL the truth of poetry for me? Ah! I think I could write on the subject exclusively for the rest of my life, producing tens of thousands of pieces and never even begin to touch ‘the truth’ of poetry. And I am just talking about my own, personal meaning, never mind the labyrinthine intricacies of the universal, pandemic truth. If such a thing exists.

I’ve considered poetry in metaphor, metonymy and metalepsis; in simile, symbolism and synecdoche. I’ve written about poetry in prose, poem, poultry, paradox and personification; in image, imagination and irony; analogy and allegory, in allusion and illusion . . . I’ve approached the bottomless well of poetry from my beliefs, my brains, my breath and my bones. I haven’t yet scratched the surface of the rippling surface. I never will.


POET

The poetry came with breath
Perhaps before: certainly, my mother says I danced
Nourished greenly on watercress and sparkling lemon-lime
The poetry came with language
In that mystic moment when labeling turned
To understanding
Perhaps before: star-fish fingers, sky-reaching to touch
The limpid moon

On a scaffolding of idea and image
I have been sculpting since my fingers formed
Perhaps before: shaping with shadow
Gilding with glitter, building with breath and bone,
With layers of learning and lore,
Hollowing out the harmony
Between the language of deep darkness
And the radiant tongues of angels,
Balanced in an open door of twining twilight

Neither actuality or accuracy, factuality or fidelity
But a blending of both
Synthesis and symmetry
Something replete, round and whole
Stones of antiquity, classic bedrock granite
Blending smoothly with seafoam and mist
In this abstract, concrete creation
This spiraling, seamless montage
Produced for no audience, for no audience will come

Fact: there will be no eyes to see
No ears to hear; no fingers with enough interest
To trace my pale blue veins, from wrist to heart
Truth: it matters not at all
The creation goes on
A conception shaped of joy
Forged out of pain
Fashioned of a needless necessity
Molded to pour full and mellow
Filling a sweet, hollow yearning
Which has echoed with seasound and moonsong
Since the dawning
Perhaps before . . .


©Edwina Peterson Cross



(Anyone who caught the chicken gets a sticker!)