Saturday
December 4, 1997
Home

You Begin

You begn this way:
this is your hand,
this is your eye,
that is a fish, blue and flat
on the paper, almost
the shape of an eye.
This is your mouth, this is an O
or a moon, whichever
you like. This is yellow.

Outside the window
is the rain, green
because it is summer, and beyond that
the trees then the world,
which is round and has only
the colours of these nine crayons.

This is the world, which is fuller
and more difficult to learn than I have said.
You are right to smudge it that way

with the red and then
the orange: the world burns.

Once you have learned these words
you will learn that there are more
words than you can ever learn.
The word hand floats above your hand
like a small cloud over a lake.
The word hand anchors
your hand to this table,
your hand is a warm stone
I hold between two words.

This is your hand, these are my hands, this is the world,
which is round but not flat and has more colours
than we can see.

It begins, it has an end,
this is what you will
come back to, this is your hand.

Margaret Atwood.

For me poetry is about the way words sound together, the way they sit right next to each other, the way they meld and become a thing of immense beauty, together. Words are by themselves beautiful, but it is only in combination with others that their true beauty and power can shine. Relationships are like this. There are those mundane, dreary, functional words we use for day to day speech, workaday words for getting by. Then there are those which make erudite conversation and sparkling poetry. With so many workaday words making up our vocabulary, set in patterns and phrases said without thought, deed or action, erudition feels elusive, unattainable. Like the hard work required to craft and deliver a compliment of words, shaped into a poem, it can all seem too much. defaulting to those words necessary to get by is a welcome refuge.

Careful work, concentration on form and composition, and a coming to rest with the final process is the creating of a work of art. Where those words combine to deliver breathtaking clarity and astounding beauty the craft is worth the time. These products, like beautiful poetry often remain hidden, uncharted, at bay. But they can be released, set free and allowed to combine.

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