Celebrating National Poetry Month
(IMPORTANT: Thursday, April 18 is Poem in Your Pocket Day. Take poems with you everywhere and read them anywhere you can.)
Dear Humans,
If you’ve read my previous posts, you know that I’m a poet who thinks a lot about social issues. Poverty has been on my mind lately, so, for national poetry month, I am posting a poem I wrote about homelessness.
If Homeless People Were Bombs
from Soul Speak (2000)if homeless people were bombs
would we smother them with disdain
let them huddle next to trash can fires
throw them cents and scraps in the rainbillions spent
calming sheltering
bombs
still
no arms
to safeguard
our peopleour people
even when they smell like trashthey are roses
and they are lovelier than bombs
I hope you take the time to read more poems this month. Here are five that have changed me:
Kindness – Naomi Shihab Nye (from The Words Under the Words)
The World Is a Beautiful Place – Lawrence Ferlinghetti (from A Coney Island of the Mind)
A Single Autumn – W.S. Merwin (from The Shadow of Sirius)
Theme for English B – Langston Hughes (from The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes)
Revolutionary Dreams – Nikki Giovanni (from Re:Creation) – (The LA Review of Books did an interview with Giovanni during which the interviewer read the poem.)
If you’re feeling inspired, write some poems of your own. You may not need any help, but if you do, these prompts can get you started: https://thinkwritten.com/poetry-prompts/
Finally, for you writers, I’m posting a quote from the late Irish poet Seamus Heaney. I think about it whenever I’m worried that I didn’t use the right words in the right way or that something I wrote just was not sensitive enough, deep enough, or good enough.
“…it is dangerous for a writer to become too self-conscious about his own processes: to name them too definitively may have the effect of confining them to what is named. A poem always has elements of accident about it, which can be made the subject of inquest afterwards, but there is always a risk to conducting your own inquest: you might begin to believe the coroner in yourself rather than put your trust in the man in you who is capable of the accident” (Heaney, 1980, p. 52)
Stay well and human,
Stacy
References
Heaney, S. (1980). Feeling into words. In Preoccupations: Selected Prose, 1968-1978, New York, NY: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
Torian, S. (2000). Soul Speak. Durham, NC: Vandorhall.
Copyright © 2019 by Stacy Torian. All rights reserved.
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Stacy Torian 