If you do not read poetry you miss much. You miss star showers around your head and arrows near your heart. You miss the fire that lights itself. You miss the hawks that soar towards the sun. You miss the marigolds in your path. You miss the sudden jolt of newness in an old world.
In his endlessly entrancing book about poetry, A Private Art, Geoffrey Grigson writes that most people read poetry but not much of it. “The poems most people know and enjoy and turn over and over again through their lives are like prayers addressed to the mystery of themselves. They don’t need to add to their small stock, they don’t want to, either.”
I have not been like that in my own life. I have always wanted to add to my stock of poems and grow into loving them. There is hardly a week I do not add to that stock. Lately I was re-reading the love poems of Hitamoro, thirteen centuries old, Japan’s “Saint of Poetry,” one poem especially about leaving his wife behind as he goes on a long trip and he writes so beautifully of her clinging to him, clinging to his side as he goes, not wanting him to leave, swaying at his side like sea-leaf tendrils in the
