The Poetry Reading
As we gather our poems together tonight
We stand in our courage
Excited, frightened and awed
By our willingness to speak, to listen,
And to expose the territory of our Souls.
We’ve come here to embrace
The idea of the holy
And to rage against the sorrows
That have no voice
We’ve come to bless
The landscapes of our lives
Now bestowed with meaning,
And with grieving,
With cries and sounds and shouts
That have saturated the pages
Of our notebooks
And soothed the ragged edges
Of our lives.
We come together to share our stories…
Those words that have spilled out
Across the page—
Sloppilly, haltingly, torrentially,
Those words we’ve used to extract the marrow
And particulars of a life.
As Rumi said: “There are many ways
To kneel and kiss the ground.”
As poets, we know this…
Struggling to find the sacred in the ordinary.
With poems we come to know ourselves
Differently, passionately, personally
Hearing our true voice,
Perhaps for the first time
As we’ve shaken off
The unexamined life
The way a dog shakes off
His sluggishness
And bounds back into the scent
Of a place, a time, a story.
In these moments tonight
We hold each other with a knowing regard,
As we speak our truth:
“This is how it was for me”
And we listen to hear
How the other has caught the way--
How light has come into their life
And then left--
How night comes in,
And then the morning follows.
It is good to hear
each other….
~J. Elizabeth Spring
