How to be as Clever as a Tree, as Wise as a Mountain, as True as Time
I JUST NOTICED that Blair Mahoney and Tania Sheko at Melbourne High had posted my poem “Why You’re Here—In Case One Day You Need to Know” as their poem of the day on Wednesday this week.
I wrote the poem to remind myself in poetry of the lyric philosophy I try to live by. It is easy to forget, under the heavy fire of everyday trauma, what it is that holds you in the world and makes your life seem worthy of your living it. I wrote the poem with my children in mind, too. Here’s some of it:
TO COME TRUE IS WHY
They sent you; to see off your fears;
To outsmart all you keep thinking
You know; to grow clever as a tree,
Holy as the bluest light, old as rivers,
Useful as a stone temple in the soft-
Spoken mouth of a valley ten thousand
Feet up in the highest range of hills
Earth knows how to find. You are
Here to find out why you’re here—
Just you, just now—and why you’ve
Been given just these hands and only
So much to hold onto.
The poem was published late last year in The Blue Nib journal. It’s a central poem, articulating as it does, a way of beginning again and again, in my next collection, A Beginner’s Guide, out early next year, on my sixtieth birthday, from Bird Fish Books.
Here’s the poem in Medium:
And here’s me reading the poem yesterday:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYIEA8jlZ9g&list=PLS54dXG33h-Cpbeh0Hk95hbpbka7TRKmy&index=1
