Poetry Friday: I’m hosting! (and a new poem)

Welcome to the Poetry Friday round-up! 

Last week, the Poetry Peeps shared pieces inspired by the work of U.S. Poet Laureate Arthur Sze. The challenge was flexible. (Read: “Pick a poem, any poem! Write in his style, or don’t! Focus on a line, a stanza, a theme, the ghost of an idea. Whatever you want!”) I love a wide-open challenge … until I don’t. But the fault, dear reader, was with me, not with the peeps posing the challenge. As I’m wont to do, I allowed procrastination and choice-paralysis to defeat me. I wrote nothing for last weeks’s round-up, so I decided to tackle it this week. Here’s how it unfolded:

I tinkered with one of my favorite Sze poems, "The Shapes of Leaves.” I played around with the shapes of houses, I experimented with the shapes of hands (as the objects that "our emotions resemble”) but I wasn’t satisfied with what was flowing. (Because it wasn’t flowing.) I still liked those ideas, but set them aside.

Then I bumped up against another of Sze’s poems, one that, serendipitously and in that lovely, winding way of poetry, happens to reference “The Shapes of Leaves.” Eureka! 

In “Residence on Earth,” Sze recounts a gathering of poets and a reading of his work. I did a little digging and it seems he’s referring to the Festival Internacional de Poesía de Medellín. (Here's a video of his reading.) 

“Residence on Earth” ends with:  

I understood how poets from all over the world

had come for peace, solidarity, justice—
and when my host, and reader of my poems

in Spanish, invited me into his home, I saw
one way to live during our residencia en la tierra.

I took the words “one way to live” and ran with them. Here’s my draft: 

One Way to Live
(after “Residence on Earth” by Arthur Sue)

One way to live on this earth

is in stunned observation. 

You see chaos before you,
but are paralyzed, inert,
a terrified deer.

One way to live on this earth

is in constant bellicosity. 

You howl at the lunacy 
until your throat 

is raw and torn.  

One way to live on this earth

is in quiet service. 

You see gaping needs; 

you fill one, meet another, 

walk toward the next. 

One way to live on this earth 

is in the 

shimmering 

rainfall 

of 

words. 

You shine light,

reflect truths:

chaos, lunacy, 

desperate need, yes,

but also beauty, tenderness, 

the shape of a leaf.  

 

A band of poets become 

one voice, create one home, 

fashion a refuge.  

Together, 

while in residence on earth, 

they have found 

one way to live. 

~ Karen Edmisten 

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