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Seeking What I Might Never Find
Chasing the great poets of my late night dreams
My Poetry Failed Me
Poetry healed me, changed me, then finally failed me. I was darkness wrapped in blackness, not a particle of light could find its way through the madness of my youth. When I believed I had it all, I lost it all, starting life again when others were savoring their arrival.
Reading always saved me. What I needed to go forward could always be found in books. But never poetry, always books of the functional world.
Frost sat on my shelf for years, a gift never read, never time for the esoteric dancing of his magic. A night of feeling sorry for myself, with nothing to read, led me to pick up his work.
My first read, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” took me out of myself, out of my self-pity, taking me to a moment in time frozen for a hundred years by a master of the image. I sat up late, reading the entire collection, rereading “The Road Not Taken,” and Snowy Evening until I had both memorized.
Poetry brought me peace when my mind would never quit, a time when I needed to stop, think, begin again, because the path I was on was leading to a bad ending. Poetry opened a creative path I long neglected, an outlet for one who never let go of the tail of the tiger that…
