For all my poet friends

Annie, Zigzackly, and all of you poets out there who occupy the letters of the alphabet in between, this quote’s for you:

“Whether anyone pays us or respects us or calls us a poet or not, just about any person alive will feel a tickle behind the left ear when we catch ourselves saying, ‘It was a little big and pretty ugly, but it’s coming along shortly…’ We stop in our tracks when a child pointing to the sunset cries that the day is bleeding and is going to die. Poetry approaches, pauses, then skirts around us like a cat….and poems roll under the furniture, left and right. I’ve lost so many I can’t count them. I do understand that they fall when I’m least able to pay attention because poems fall not from a tree, really, but from the richly pollinated boughs of an ordinary life, buzzing, as lives do, with clamor and glory. They are easy to miss but everywhere: poetry just is, whether we revere it or try to put it in prison. It is elementary grace, communicated from one soul to another. It reassures us of what we know and socks us in the gut with what we don’t, it sings us awake, it’s irresistible, it’s contagious.”
–Barbara Kingsolver, ‘Stealing Apples’, from the collection Small Wonder.