by Kim Robinson

Created on: November 28, 2007

BECAUSE OF POETRY, I BREATHE

Nothing can move me; make me cry, rock my world, or make me fly like poetry can.
I will even admit that without poetry, I could not have survived my adolescence and girlhood days. But at 12 years old when I stumbled upon Sylvia Plath, my life, as I knew it, transformed. I was like, "Wow, I'm not the only one. I am not alone. This is about me!"

Poetry has that kind of power and magic.

My preferred poets are women: Plath, Sexton, Gluck, Michaels, and Angelou, with the exception of Li-Young Lee. These poets have given me joy, delight, enlightenment, stimulation, and hope; these poets, have somewhat, given me life.

Here are some of my transformational, ultimate, stunning, revolutionary lines of poetry:

*All night your moth-breath / flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen: / a far sea moves in my ear (Plath, Morning Song).

*And here you come, with a cup of tea / wreathed in steam. / the blood jet is poetry / there is not stopping it / you hand me two children, two roses (Plath, Kindness).

*If the moon smiled, she would resemble you / you leave the same impression / of something beautiful, but annihilating / both of you are light borrowers / her O-mouth grieves at the world; yours is unaffected (Plath, The Rival)

*Imagine it. A radio playing / and everyone here was crazy / I liked it and danced in a circle / music pours over the senses / and in a funny way / music sees more than I / I mean it remembers better (Sexton, Music Swims Back to Me)

*The business of words keeps me awake / I am drinking cocoa / that warm brown mama (Sexton, The Ambition Bird)

*You may write me down in history / with your bitter, twisted lies / you may trod me in the very dirt / but still like dust, I'll rise (Angelou, Still I Rise)

*Look at the night sky / I have two selves, two kinds of power / I am here with you, at the window / watching you react. Yesterday / the moon rose over moist earth in the lower garden / Now the earth glitter like a the moon / like dead matter crusted with light (Gluck, Spring Snow)

*There's another skin inside my skin / that gathers to your touch. A lake to the light / that loses it's memory, its lost language / into your tongue / erasing me into newness (Michaels, Flowers)

*The old book I finished reading / I've since read it again and again / and what was far grows near / and what is near grows more dear / and all of my visions and interpretations / depend on what I see / and between my eyes is always / the rain, the migrant rain (Li-Young Lee, Visions and Interpretations)

Poetry has the power to transform societies, worlds, and lives. Without it, I don't know if I'd be writing this. Because of poetry, I breathe.

*References*

Sylvia Plath, Ariel
Anne Sexton, The Complete Poems
Maya Angelou, The Complete Poems
Louise Gluck, The Wild Iris
Anne Michaels, Poems
Li-Young Lee, Rose

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