Poetry 🪷

Read poetry every day of your life. Poetry is good because it flexes muscles you don’t use often enough. Poetry expands the senses and keeps them in prime condition. It keeps you aware of your nose, your eye, your ear, your tongue, your hand. And, above all, poetry is compacted metaphor or simile. Such metaphors, like Japanese paper flowers, may

“Poetry is the secret code to staying alive, to staying present, to staying visionary.”

— David Whyte

Prose is to poetry as walking is to dancing.

PAUL VALÉRY

The mountain is fine

At evening of the day,

Birds fly Home together.

Within these things

There is a hint of Truth,

But if I try to tell it,

I cannot find the Words.

You ask me why I dwell in the green mountains.

I smile and make no reply.

My heart is free of care.

The peach-tree blooms,

The waters Flow

Into the unknown.

I dwell in a Realm

That is not of Men.

‘I omit the unusual – the hurricane and earthquakes – and describe the common,’ Thoreau wrote in his journal, ‘this is the true theme of poetry.’