Sunday, November 25, 2012

Poetry as spiritual practice


 
 
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