Poetry Has Not Failed Me

 Big thanks to Annmarie for passing along Mary Oliver’s essay collection Upstream. I’m loving it.

I read a poem everyday, and lately it has felt like poetry has failed me. I read things and nothing stands out. Sometimes I read several poems and keep coming up dry.

Then today I read Mary Oliver’s essay “My Friend Walt Whitman” and when I got to the final paragraph, something opened up. I picked up my David Whyte collection and read “Cuzco.” The light shined down on the pages and I knew that I had been seeking something when in essence, I needed to let the words find me.

I have combined the final paragraph of the essay and parts of David’s poem into a double found poem. The bold parts are David’s words, the italicized Mary’s.

The gold hands of the high mountains in a blaze from the hidden sun, 

the streaming light and the shadows in the west

hiding the nested houses.

I learned from Whitman the poem is a temple — or a green field—

a place to enter and in which to feel.

You would stay and I would go on.

One story already becoming old, how I left you.

A poem is made not just to be exact,

But to speak—to be company.

And I laughed with you, a wild faithlessness

to life gripping me for a moment.

It was everything that was needed

when everything was needed.