ODE TO A POET AND POETS

I write these words somewhat in honor of

          my favorite poet of recent years—

                   Billy Collins.

I know him, but he doesn’t know me and he does just fine with

that arrangement I’m sure.

But it leaves me without the opportunity to tell someone

“I had lunch with Billy Collins yesterday. 

He liked my latest poem and wants me to write more.”

I did have morning coffee with him this morning, though,

so to speak, sitting at the round glass table in the yard

          reading to myself from his book

                   The Trouble With Poetry and other poems.

I’m telling you this for no particular reason other than to drop his name in the only way I know how.

Once I was shown the room where Longfellow penned his famous “Tales of the Wayside Inn” at, no less, the Wayside Inn in Sudbury, Mass.

I stood reverently in the doorway

          and stared at the very desk he used

                   and thought to myself

                             I wonder if I sat there in that very chair

                                      at that very desk, I could write something

                                                as intriguing and profound as did he?

Once I stood at the foot of Robert Frost’s grave in Bennington, VT.

 

I tried to imagine him sitting in some quaint setting, maybe staring out a window with pen in hand, trying to think of the next line after

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth…

I wondered if I had lived in New England and perhaps even grew up there, picking apples, mending stone fences, and stopping by a woods on a snowy evening, could I have been a poet with such great lines pouring out of my soul?

What I have concluded is that we are all the poets and writers of our own lives, 

just as fascinating

just as colorful

just as profound

just as musical as any we have read about

but we are always looking beyond ourselves

to find the true life we think we are not living

but have had all along.

I will forever continue to read my favorite poets and appreciate the artistry of their words, but I will also try to remain aware of the fact that what they are mostly telling us is to look around us and see that we are living literary-worthy lives too.