Poetry on Thursday

Quite a few people have commented that they are " not poetry people" or that they "just don't understand poetry" and I'd like to talk about that a little bit. I never thought of myself as a poetry person, and I'll let you in on a secret, there is plenty of poetry that I don't get. I don't understand what the author is trying to say, the language sounds odd in my ears and feels strange in my mouth, and sometimes I feel dumb and wonder what I'm missing. 

Here is a poem that I should understand but I just don't get it (and it pains me greatly to admit it). The author is my nephew Tim Scott who majored in creative writing at The College of Santa Fe and has published two volumes of poetry. Tim is a lovely, thoughtful, quirky, creative person, and fantastic father, but I don't know what an endocrine block is, nor hypothermic blues. I do know that Uncle Jim and Harry Cat are both gone, but as much as I've puzzled over his poems, I don't think they were written for me. 

Foreshadow
Tim Scott

This is how it begins:
by banging and shivering the halls
in the house at the endocrine block,
paths tramped by Uncle Jim and Harry Cat,
the moldering barracks out back,
mazed with towers standing and towers toppled
of ledgers, yearbooks, manuscripts,
wholly wrenched and creaking in the wind
like a galleon's ribbed timbers,
rigged to breathe, rigged to run the hypothermic blues,
with Mike clutching our story folder,
back of the line, concession stand at the town pool,
pale and waterlogged, rivulet-headed
leashed by the eyes to Cara Abernathy's one-piece,
trying not to grind my teeth in the cold, because this is how it ends:
shadows stringbeaning in the afternoon,
when defeated was only something I thought I could be.

Scott, Tim. "Foreshadow". Our Lady of Perpetual Motion, America Star Books, 2012. 

With the pandemic, Kym's sharing of poetry, reading a lot more poetry on my own, and discovering a real respite in poems during this time, I've found that there is a lot of poetry that I do get. That makes me say "yes, that's just how I feel" or even "I didn't know I felt that way, but that poet deftly captured my feelings with their words". Here is a poem that makes me say those things.

Good Bones 
Maggie Smith

Life is short, though I keep this from my children.

Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine

in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,

a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways

I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least

fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative

estimate, though I keep this from my children.

For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.

For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,

sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world

is at least half terrible, and for every kind

stranger, there is one who would break you,

though I keep this from my children. I am trying

to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,

walking you through a real shithole, chirps on

about good bones: This place could be beautiful,

right? You could make this place beautiful.

Smith, Maggie. "Good Bones". Waxwing, 2016.

So relax and don't worry about whether you are a poetry person or not. I bet that someday

you'll read a poem, it will speak to you and just maybe begin to turn you into a poetry

person. And if not, no worries!