Making Music

Poetry is essential to my life, my spirit, and my thinking. William Carlos Williams writes: "It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there." I will often post the poems that currently sustain me and I hope they please and inspire you too.

The word "poem" comes from the Greek poiein to make, do, create, compose. Mythopoesis, the making of myths, is an elegant word to describe the purpose of this blog. Alas, I feared that few would do a google search using the term. Something for us to rectify together.

Poem, poesis, to make. Interestingly, David Bohm notes that the root meaning of the word "fact" is "that which has been made," as in manufacture (Wholeness and the Implicate Order, Routledge, 2002, p. 55).

Here is a poem for this week. Make music, and play it loud.

A Dream of Trees

There is a thing in me that dreamed of trees,
A quiet house, some green and modest acres
A little way from every troubling town,
A little way from factories, schools, laments.
I would have time I thought, and time to spare,
With only birds and streams for company,
To build out of my life a few wild stanzas.
And then it came to me, that so was death,
A little way away from everywhere.

There is a thing in me still dreams of trees.
But let it go. Homesick for moderation,
Half the world's artists shrink or fall away.
If any find solution, let him tell it.
Meanwhile, I bend my heart toward lamentation
Where, as the times implore our true involvement,
The blades of every crisis point the way.

I would it were not so, but so it is.
Who ever made music of a mild day?

--Mary Oliver, from New and Selected Poems