Snippets of Poetry
In this post you’ll find:
- A short discussion about snippets.
- A sad snippet.
- A snippet suggesting the value of sadness.
- A hopeful snippet.
Sometimes ideas come to you as feelings or impressions. Sometimes they come with force, as words already formed. Sometimes they aren’t enough to furnish the structure or content for a complete poem, so you hold them until another idea complements or contrasts. Sometimes they stay snippets.
Above is a photo of the Setas de Sevilla, a wooden sculpture in Seville, Spain. Just a photo, not a snippet.
Mantras
A person I’ve known for many years, an activist and environmentalist, was feeling down, and when I asked why he said that he’d failed the earth. I made the obvious retorts – that he was taking a lot on his shoulders thinking it was his responsibility to save the earth, that in any event the earth would be fine, it was our species and others that were at risk – but when faced with the overwhelming amount of bad news and the equally overwhelming evidence of climate change, those retorts seemed weak. So I shared a mantra I repeat to myself:
And I say this to remind myself that we are situated in a historical reality – things that have come before (like languages, religions, politics – our whole culture) tend to hang in there, but our current culture and political climate, what we’re experiencing right now, has not always existed the way it does, has no inherent right to be the way it is or maintain itself, and it is changeable.
Thinking about my friend, however, these words came to me:
Images
I spilled some water on my leather couch the other day, just a few drops, and they shone in the sun, bright, like tears on a cheek. I’ve been through some difficult life passages lately, and although I’ve tried my best to let the feelings inhabit their own time and space in my heart, I do have the habit of moving on, of looking for the bright side, of not letting things get me down. And I thought how much of a shame it was that we can’t honour and cherish our sadness as something worthy of experiencing.
Songs
I attended a concert at The Yardbird Suite in Edmonton by a local singer/songwriter. After the concert I was home, writing, trying to work through the changes taking place in my life, and a poem came to me as a song, sung by her voice. This is not entirely unusual. About 35 years ago, a local theatre critic attended a play constructed around Shakespeare’s sonnets and wrote her Edmonton Journal review in iambic pentameter. Everyone thought she’d gone mad. The point is that we can be deeply affected by different art forms, and that’s a good thing. So the following is meant to be a song, with a simple rhyme scheme, internal rhymes, and a regular beat. Try to imagine these words sung by a beautiful voice.
I’ll likely destroy this with future re-writes, so I hope you enjoy it in its infancy.