Poetry is Presence & Presence is Poetry

Photo by sendi gibran on Unsplash

I stared at a cloud while lounging at the pool yesterday. It’s become a rhythm for our family as we slip into the last month of summer—a quiet morning, an afternoon by the pool, an evening of climbing at the gym, with some work and good meals thrown about in between.

So while one kid made a friendship bracelet and the other played pickle ball with Dad, I watched the cloud, and quickly threw some lines into the back of the book I’d been reading (The Jane Austen Diet and I highly recommend!) because the day I write a poem about a cloud is the day I decide not to bring a journal or my phone to the pool, and so it goes.

I think poems written in the back pages of books are pretty lovely, anyway.

Photo by Alif Caesar Rizqi Pratama on Unsplash

So I wrote about the cloud, lines like

Its cotton-ball likeness drew me first//

the outside, cottony white

contrasted to the splotches of gray

at the center, lighter and darker

in shade across its subtle edges//

When I finished the poem, I thought about how poetry sneaks up on me so often when I am out in nature, when I notice a thing I did not notice before. I also wrote about the spider adventuring along my arm, what the journey must be like, feel like for all the creatures different than me.

I wondered if writing takes us away from a moment, distracts us with words from the actual act of being present.

In my book Living Resistance I have an entire chapter dedicated to the topic of presence, the embodiment of it. I write:

Presence is about recognizing our relationship to ourselves and one another.

So I guess presence can’t really be achieved without a breaking open, a spreading wide, curiosity taking over whatever we thought we were doing in the first place.

Presence distracts us from our problems but ushers us into a better way forward because we recognize that we are connected to the world around us.

And if we are writers, of course, we can’t help it, letting words spill forth when that curiosity breaks us open. It’s within us, the words, and they show up when they want to, sometimes when we plan for them and most times when we don’t.

I often think those words get in the way of being present to the world, but really, they add to the magic. They create a vehicle for us to explore and stay curious.

Poetry is presence, and presence is poetry.

My youngest told me recently that being an author is a lot like being a composer, that creating words, books, is a lot like creating music. Being a singer-songwriter in a former life, I can relate, and it’s true. When we have an experience, the music shows up, the words show up, the poems show up.

Throughout history poets have been trusted with so much—to tell the truth about history, to point us to the sacred, to reveal some magic we are missing.

Poets are known for being present to the things of this earth and putting them in a form that can be appreciated and held by others.

Next time I experience utter magic in communion with Mother Earth, I won’t tell myself to stop writing, or that the constant flow of words in my head is stealing the moment. Instead, I’ll lean in, unafraid, and let curiosity take over for a little while.

I’ll pause and breathe, and with the breathing, I’ll create and use the medicine I know best, because it’s the very thing that will get me through to the next moment.

Iw, amen.