Tomorrow begins National Poetry Month, and today I spent some time on poets.org, following links from their Poetry 101 page, looking at their list of poets who have defined the poetic landscape, hungrily pouring input into the cavernous gap of my ignorance. Later, while I was scrubbing the tub, I thought of two sentences: “It was so old, I was surprised to find it true;” and, “It was so true, I was surprised to find it old.” They reflected a feeling I got while reading the poems - that our sense of literary time is different from our sense of current time, though both are real in their ways. As a child, I mourned my lack of the landscape of stories, wishing to trade my suburban environment for the woods, the meadows, the villages that I found in books. Now these things are even further from current experience, but they seem to live on in our language of imagery.
Story Time
One part of life moves through the surface day
the texting, facebook, groceries, price of gas
Another part moves half submerged
through caves and pools of leavings from the past
This memory, this story, this impression
from which we make our maps, decide our goals
was formed before today’s brash supercession
erased the landmarks, swept away the trails
The little house, the woods, the town - all gone
The farm, the friendly neighbors, wilderness
The landscapes we imagine can’t be found
within this GPS’d and fractured place
But still we walk these paths, in stories, dreams
Within our inner world their presence gleams.
©Wendy Mulhern
March 31, 2011
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