Monday, April 4, 2011

National Poetry Month

Poetry is my spirituality.  One cannot rush reading a poem, but deliberation and thoughtfulness are necessary.  A poem can express a thought or mood, or weave a story, as well as relay the intangible.  A poem has the potential to speak directly to the soul, because its' essence isn't rooted in logic or convention; it forces us to closely examine the world and/or experience the sublime.
Lately Hafiz has been by my side, but I chose this poem by Borges because a) it's awesome b) I feel that Borges is overlooked as a poet.  I'm a fan of his short stories too, but it's really his poetry that I've fallen in love with.
The Art Of Poetry by Jorge Luis Borges
To gaze at a river made of time and water
And remember Time is another river.
To know we stray like a river
and our faces vanish like water.

To feel that waking is another dream
that dreams of not dreaming and that the death
we fear in our bones is the death
that every night we call a dream.

To see in every day and year a symbol
of all the days of man and his years,
and convert the outrage of the years
into a music, a sound, and a symbol.

To see in death a dream, in the sunset
a golden sadness--such is poetry,
humble and immortal, poetry,
returning, like dawn and the sunset.

Sometimes at evening there's a face
that sees us from the deeps of a mirror.
Art must be that sort of mirror,
disclosing to each of us his face.

They say Ulysses, wearied of wonders,
wept with love on seeing Ithaca,
humble and green. Art is that Ithaca,
a green eternity, not wonders.

Art is endless like a river flowing,
passing, yet remaining, a mirror to the same
inconstant Heraclitus, who is the same
and yet another, like the river flowing.

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