On why poetry could save me

There are moments in life, rare ones, when you feel intimately connected with the inanimate.

You cannot believe that something that can’t move — as still as that pen that refuses to write your words for you — has moved you.

I had one of these moments last night. I didn’t go looking for it but this journey that I am on led me to it. Sort of like when you turn a blind corner, and a lush garden in bloom with all your favourite flowers meets your unfocused eyes, to make you suddenly aware that you had been walking with a purpose. The air becomes still, and the moment is etched in your mind with a smile that surprised even you. Then come the tears almost instantaneously, tugged by the engine of this thing that is not moving but is slowly gaining momentum.

How are you not transported then to another realm of consciousness? How are you to resist the implication of these connections?

It is all inevitable. It happens because the black on white speaks of all the grey in you and what is dead in terms of life is more alive than all the real you see.

Thank you Mary Oliver for a poem that may just have saved me,

The Journey

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice–
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
‘Mend my life!’
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognised as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do–
determined to save
the only life you could save.

Copyright @ 1986 by Mary Oliver. First published in Dream Work, Atlantic Monthly Press. Reprinted in New and Selected Poems, Volume One, Beacon Press.