real words

…everything will happen

if you wait - even love, even hope

and comfort, even in that far hour

on this earth

when something, just the wind perhaps

in branches,

will say your name with only wild joy

from For One Who Goes Alone, Joseph Fasano

Poetry doesn't move me, most days. Prose tugs at my heart strings in ways that poetry's stiff demands often obscure.

In both, my patience is nonexistent for words of conjecture rather than experience. Give me Willa Cather with her cold hard high desert and prairie winds, John Steinbeck with his bestowed and chosen agonies, Audre Lorde as sister and outsider. Prose and poetry from their bodies, from their hearts.

Sometimes poets present themselves, and there they are with sentences that create breathing space and grace, that take away the life-draining demands of people and systems, poets who have experienced or just feel the grievous and sublime of life. They might be the 5 year old near me who grieves that life should always be more beautiful than it is. Perhaps a teacher bringing students and his circle in touch with essentials.

What if, after years

of trial,

a love should come

and lay a hand upon you

and say,

this late,

your life is not a crime

Sudden Hymn in Winter, Fasano again