38

Today is my 38th birthday. It's been quite a while since I've written anything here. I have a few creative notions on the vine, but the ideas I've been nurturing aren't ripe for the picking yet. They are fragile and green, and should I grab at them now, they would only rot away, never reaching their full flavor, never serving their purpose to nourish a mind and propagate.

Today, I recieved the gift of good poetry. Not my own, but that of Linda Gregg, a New Yorker whose existence I was previously oblivious to, and to whom my own existence likely remains unkown.

Her poem Elegance appeared in the American Life in Poetry column that I recieve via email. It is one of the few in the year or so that I have recieved the column that has moved me to pass the seed along, to propagate in a world drowning in poems about feelings and thoughts, where rhyming verse about love and derisive dissonance have flooded out voices that deserve to be heard. (Wait, I write about love and derision!)


Elegance

All that is uncared for.
Left alone in the stillness
in that pure silence married
to the stillness of nature.
A door off its hinges,
shade and shadows in an empty room.
Leaks for light. Raw where
the tin roof rusted through.
The rustle of weeds in their
different kinds of air in the mornings,
year after year.
A pecan tree, and the house
made out of mud bricks. Accurate
and unexpected beauty, rattling
and singing. If not to the sun,
then to nothing and to no one.