Do I Dare To Eat A Peach?

April is poetry month and I almost let it slip away without a tribute to the oldest form of writing. As a writer, poetry was my first love. It was like little pieces of flash fiction without the fiction, the baring of flesh without the embarrassment. Some of those early poems make me cringe, but I always remember what my esteemed creative writing teacher from Edison State College once told me, “All writing is good.” I realize now what she meant. The effort is good. Even a first attempt is good. All writing needs editing but first you have to have a draft, a first line, a cheesy poem.

One of my personal favorites is The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, by T.S. Eliot. I believe it is his best.  If you listen to this read aloud, you’ll discover that a poem can cause visions.

Eliot’s masterpiece has many compartments, like the galleries in which “the women come and go, talking of Michelangelo.” It’s about mortality and growing old and why is it so hard for us to accept that?  “There will be time, there will be time. Time for you and time for me.”

Read aloud, it is a gift to give someone who will listen.  From the first stanza:

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherized upon a table;

Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,

The muttering retreats

Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels

And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells. 

April has been cold and unfriendly. I’ll be happy to see it leave. Maybe May will bring love songs, “And time for a hundred visions and revisions.”

Adieu