to harness poetry

I’ve been reading and writing poetry this month, meaning to post one a day…but I write poems and forget about them.

Poetry just comes so quietly–at least, it does to me. I jot it down and don’t remember for hours, sometimes even days.

But I feel like it’s naturally going to escape.

Poetry seems like the heart sighing–in relief, grief, or loneliness–and that takes shape in something without rules. I can rarely come up with rhyming poems. I’m not surprised that I’d write and forget, because it’s just…a breath.

And not a lot of people stop to appreciate their own breathing. I guess that’s what makes a poet: Noticing the little things.

(Tennyson is obviously rubbing off. When you read enough of something, your journal entries and blog posts change…Jane Austen and Bram Stoker did it, too, in the past. :P)

Do you have a favorite poem?

I left you in the morning,
And in the morning glow,
You walked a way beside me
To make me sad to go.
— Robert Frost