The first time I was called a poet, I took offense:
for poetry is good for nothing: it neither makes love
nor wages war, nor pays the bills. Poetry is a fossil record,
is the hope that elegizing a shadow will re-animate
the object that casts it; and poets are archeologists
who spend a lifetime scribbling in the soil because worms
are sacred and reviled. Poetry is a child in bed, the lights out,
projecting a cosmos onto the ceiling; his parents fretting
over the state of the world; all the people he may or may not
meet longing like atoms of ice for love to free them
of their loneliness; the heat that sears and the cold that burns;
the agony and the aloe. But poetry is where I go to right the wrongs
of the day: the faucet that, resisting my wrench, drips on; the box
of Mac & Cheese left in the cart, my son chiding me for forgetting
it; the half-read page, sock that failed to make it to the wash; toys
not put away, lying in wait like a landmine in one of those wars
you see on TV while eating dinner, earth stained with blood and laundry
stuffed to the brim…Poetry is our only hope for life, for there is no God,
and the Word begins with Us.