When it Clicks
Atlanta Parent WHEN IT CLICKS I had always thought poetry was just adults hiding simple ideas beneath fancy words, like putting a hat on a squirrel and calling it fashion. Then, on a lazy Tuesday afternoon, somewhere between a metaphor and a badly behaved comma, the poet said something that cracked the code. Suddenly, words stopped sitting on the page like obedient little soldiers. They began to really live. A blue door could be sadness. Rain could remember. A sentence could turn a corner and come back wearing somebody else’s face. I felt the whole room tilt. The poem wasn’t something I was writing anymore. It was something I was seeing. And there it was—bright, impossible, grinning at me in words, and the iridescent image swims through a mirror that flows. Oh. That’s what poetry does. I got it. And, frankly, the universe has been showing off ever since. ----- This Prosery shared with DVerse Poets Pub in celebration of my hometown boy, Stanley Kunitz . (We claim Elizabeth Bishop, and R...
