Tag: poetry

The Art of Poetry: Confusion and Clarity

~ Linda Wright

Each day I read at least one poem. It’s become a habit in the past few years. It’s also a quest to understand poetry. Having never taken a poetry class, I have little understanding of what the elements of a poem should be. Rather like art, I know what I like and what does not appeal, but I have little understanding of why. Often the punctuation confuses me, as does the way the lines are broken up. There are poems where only one or two lines will jump out at me as meaningful.

I take a rather random approach to selecting my daily poem, letting it arrive in my email inbox or on a podcast. Some days I even spin the poetry app on my phone. Some of the poems I read leave me feeling rather confused. I assume that those poems did appeal to other readers. Some days a poem leaves me feeling comforted that I am not alone. Then there are days when I am simply in awe of the craft of arranging words in unconventional patterns until they create meaning where before I saw only chaos.

Day 25 (of 31 days of free writing

January Thaw

~ Linda Wright

When I lived in New England, the winter temperatures froze the soil, making it as rigid as cement. Ice crusted the sidewalks, stairs and streets. The most dangerous ice, however, was the wafer-thin sheets you could not see. You knew it was there only after you found yourself slipping and sliding in a frantic attempt to maintain some balance. Layers of old snow would pile up and shrink back, solidifying into granular piles of dirty gray. It had no resemblance to the white fluffy flakes that had fallen from the sky days or weeks before.

 
What was fun as a child became a drudgery as an adult. At the end of the driveway where the snowplows had scraped the street clean, the snow was packed hard and formed into angular chunks. My shoulders ached from shoveling; piling the mounds higher than my head I was hot under my winter coat while my nose was red from the cold.
 
“There’s always a thaw in January,” Mum would say with reverence. “The snow and ice will melt. We’ll have a short break from winter before it returns again in force.” Sure enough, usually in the last week of January, the temperatures would rise above freezing for several days in a row. The fog from the warm air against the cold ground would form drops of dew on windows.  The snow piles along the paths would shrink and some would disappear.  The top layer of ice covering the pond would turn into puddles. I could almost smell the earth softening.
 
Winter in North Florida is not cold; I don’t miss snow or ice. This week, it was warm enough for me to go outdoors without a sweater. Inside, I opened the windows and listened to the birds chirping. The old timers here say it is one of the warmest winters they can remember. The same is true, say my friends up North. Although we are glad, it also makes us feel uneasy. Thirteen of the warmest years since record-keeping began have occurred in the last fifteen years. It is hard to miss the photos of icebergs melting and breaking away. The number of extreme weather catastrophes around the globe are increasing year by year; droughts, massive fires, hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes, tornadoes make it hard not to notice that the climate is changing. 
 
Is it more than an ordinary January thaw?