Words
I am craving an absence of words.
Allow me to clarify – the poor words,
poor not by birth or surd evil but
impoverished due to one of the old
seven sins we’ve grown too lazy to recall.
In their place I’m hungry for riches,
words rich not by gaudy display but
royal due to having been weighed
and found pleasant; in a word, comely.
If beauty could save the world, and I
believe it can, then it only stands to
reason we might one day find ourselves
damned by our devotion to foul.
*This is my contribution to Burnside’s Winter Poetry Carnival. A few years ago Burnside Writers Collective allowed me to cut my poetic teeth on the site. Nobody really knows what to do with a poet, especially a young toddling one. To Burnside’s credit they just let me be. My gratitude to Michael Bobo for his continued editorial efforts to keep poetry alive and well and piercing on the ever-evolving Burnside site – http://burnsidewriters.com. In the true spirit of a carnival, consider this poem the words of a barker: Step right up, step right up, and try your hand at the game of language…
Your poem describes a sentiment of mine for a long time. There can even be beauty, and for certain, freshness, in carefully crafting words to describe our four-letter-emotions, rather than lazily and hastily speaking them. Maybe then our words could even bring truth, beauty, and healing for ourselves and our those we speak to, even in the midst circumstances that tear us down.
I’m craving a prolificity (if that’s a word, and I think it’s not) of the words you talk about. Especially in a certain little piece of prose I’m working on. 🙂 Poetry, that’s my royal treat to myself, my heart unedited and saved for my blog. But the two–prose and poetry–can and often do collide. That’s my favorite, when that happens.
Hope I get to that point. Maybe one day. I’m stoked if a squiggly thought makes it to the page. Plain ol’ words (with a slight southern drawl) and weedy edges.
I , too, believe that we can be saved by beauty, that we are being saved by beauty every single day. I wrote about that for 31 days in October. Nearly killed me, but I did it. :>)