To Utter the Holy

I’ve been working on this one poem for weeks now, and every day the poem changes. Initially a metaphor-filled rant, then a New York-school-like retelling of events and then breath, spaces, some enjambment and a sprinkling of grace. I wanted the poem to be angry, but she wanted me to find peace. Hmmm…it was as if each sitting with her, I was being greeted by a kind and gentle elder, a woman with long white hair, oozing wisdom. And If I had the patience to listen. She would speak.

Which, reminds me of something poet William Stafford said about the art of revision: You create a good poem not by tinkering with the poem but by revising yourself. Or Hazrat Inayat Khan who said, When the personality of an artist is absorbed in his art, it becomes art itself.

I’m still working on that poem. Maybe I’ll never finish it. And maybe that’s not the point. But today, and we stretched into Warrior Two, my yoga teacher said, even while standing still, there is still movement — you can sway your hips or shift your weight; nothing is static.

I think that’s where I am with all this. Art. Creativity. It’s all movement. It’s a way to be engaged with creativity. To become creativity. To create and become the creation. To act and be acted upon. Dialogue. Breath and movement.

And right now we need breath. And movement. And light and hope. And why art is so necessary right now, because as Martin Heidegger so beautifully noted, To be a poet in a destitute time means: to attend, singing, to the trace of the fugitive gods. This is why the poet in the time of the world’s night utters the holy.