Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Countdown to 30: Day Six

"Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?"
~ Mary Oliver


Have I mentioned I'm downright smitten with Mary Oliver's poetry? And Pablo Neruda's translated poems (how I long to read their originals and understand each word). And there's Whitman and Pinsky and Swenson and St. Vincent Millay and Cummings and on and on and on. I am smitten with each of them. With poetry in general, really. Words, frankly, and all that these morphemes and syllables and sounds are capable of creating.

It was a boy that got me into it (poetry, that is--and isn't that always the story?). The boy is long gone, of course. But the poetry. Oh, how the poetry stays.

"Someday, somewhere - anywhere, unfailingly,
you'll find yourself, and that,

and only that, can be the happiest
or bitterest hour of your life"

~ Pablo Neruda

Words are musical. Words are art. Words, when it comes right down to it, are one of the best ways in which we communicate our inner selves to the outer world.

2 comments:

Stephanie said...

We are friends because we understand the passionate, life-long love affair that one can have with words. It is, by far, my most successful relationship.

Valerie said...

Have you seen the movie Il Postino? (Pretty old now) I loved it so much I bought it and I rarely buy movies. I do understand Spanish and have read a lot of Neruda's poetry as he wrote it. Definitely amazing. :)
I found you on the MMB blog list.