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Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem.-Edgar Allan Poe

Poetry is when emotion has found its thought and thought has found words--Robert Frost

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance--Carl Sandburg

I have nothing to say, I am saying it, and that is poetry--John Cage

You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you--Joseph Joubert

Poetry is what in a poem makes you laugh, cry, prickle, be silent, makes your toe nails twinkle, makes you want to do this or that or nothing, makes you know that you are alone in the unknown world, that your bliss and suffering is forever shared and forever all your own. ~Dylan Thomas

joybragi84
Jul 282 min read

Poem-a-Week: I Think I Am Me


Quite frankly, a sunrise as beautiful as the one above that was taken last Friday morning can cause a person to have an existential crisis. However, the poem below is not the result of a personal existential crisis in me. It is what happens when an artist starts a poem, and the poem breaks the bit and runs off in it own direction without the poet being able to rein it in. One thing that I have learned in writing both bad and good poems over many years is that you do have to let some have their way. Sometimes, they go to places you might not expect. Sometimes, they come right back to you.` Sometimes, they end up in the blackberry thicket where you don't want to go in after them. This is one that I may eventually leave in the thicket. Tell me what you think. ENJOY!


I Think I Am Me

 

And what is this I call a thought?

An urge that prods but raises not?

A warning of advancing stress?

Discomfort at a neutral gaze?

A pathway through an unstringed maze

That ends inside a wilderness?

 

Or is it just a piece of soul

Seeking a figure to control

Like bulkheads aim to curb the sea?

I thought one time I did conceive

A truth that wise folk might believe

Then, I realized that it was me.

 

A crisis of identity

Has led me to the brink.

Am I a sea anemone

Or am I me because I think

I am?


Don't forget! I will have my copy of Uncle Boog and the Dogfight in my hands tomorrow. You might have a copy in your hands in a couple of weeks.



Comments

I find that I cannot exist without Poetry--without eternal poetry--half the day will not do--the whole of it--I began with a little, but habit has made me a Leviathan.-John Keats

We do not quite say that the new is more valuable because it fits in; but its fitting in is a test of its value.-T. S. Eliot

A man may praise and praise, but no one recollects but that which pleases.-George Gordon, Lord Byron

The great beauty of poetry is that it makes everything in every place interesting.-John Keats

Our faulty elder poets sacrificed the passion and passionate flow of poetry to the subtleties of intellect and to the stars of wit; the moderns to the glare and glitter of a perpetual, yet broken and heterogeneous imagery, or rather to an amphibious something, made up, half of image, and half of abstract meaning. The one sacrificed the heart to the head; the other both heart and head to point and drapery.-S. T. Coleridge

The purpose of rhythm, it has always seemed to me, is to prolong the moment of contemplation, the moment when we are both asleep and awake, which is the one moment of creation.-W. B. Yeats

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