My niece Becca sent me (and her mom, my sister Laurie) a
beautiful poem the other day and like my revelation about fashion below, has me
rethinking my relationship with poetry. Like so many, I’d even say most,
people, I never consider myself as “getting” poetry. It just didn’t speak to
me. Too contrived, affected, pretentious, Look at me – I use words and sentence
breaks cleverly!
That said, I think I’ve actually probably written 3 poems in
my life. The first was in 10th grade as an assignment in which I
think I wrote something about a dead squished frog on the side of the road. Actually,
I don’t think it, I know it. Yup. Second was a poem called “God?” that I wrote on
my cross-country bike trip that was published in our Friends’ Meeting Fall
Festival booklet in 1982 or 1983. (Yeah, that’s right. I’m a published poet.)
And I think I wrote Cheryl a poem once after watching a recent version of Romeo
and Juliet with Leo DiCaprio. Or maybe that was just a flowery email in the
manner of Shakespearese.
And I’d been wondering lately, and still am to some extent,
why music is so important to us. I “get” the appeal of books and sports and
movies and television. But what is it about music that we love. Well surely
some of it is The Beat. Probably something related to an intersection
with our heartbeat. But there are also the lyrics. And what are lyrics but
poetry set to music. And there are a lot of lyrics I like, in the increasingly rare
occasions I can understand them.
So yeah, if you have a poem you want me to read and absorb,
send it along, please. Jamiemcvickar gmail com. Just one at a time though,
please. Bonus points if you wrote it yourself.
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