The Friday Five...

Today's addition is dedicated to the wonderful world of poetry. Namely the poets whose work has changed me in some. Consequently, they are my favorites.

1. Mary Oliver. Her poem Wild Geese is one of the most beautiful things ever written. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to you imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—over and over announcing your place in the family of things. One her lines has been running through my head a lot recently and I am left asking what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

2. Adrienne Rich. If you like poetry at all, read Rich. She is a genius. I discovered her in anthology and instantly wanted more. To fill the need I went to a local bookstore's poetry shelves. I found Dream of a Common Language and was left crying in the stacks. Her work is that beautiful. ...Within two miles of this Pacific rounding this long bay, sheening light for miles/ inland, floating its fog through redwood rifts and over/ strawberry and artichoke fields, its bottomless mind/ returning always to the same rocks, the same cliffs,/ with everchanging words, always the same language/--this where I live now. If you had known me/ once, you'd still know me now though in a different/ light and life. This is no place you ever knew me.

3. Walt Whitman. His poems more than any others have shaped my own poetry. He taught me the importance of the little things, the beauty of the everyday.

I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,
I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.

4. W. B. Yeats. Reading his work was when I first learned the power of poetry. I balanced all, brought all to mind./ The years to come seemed waste of breath,/ a waste of breath, the years behind/ in balance with this life, this death.

5. Louise Gluck. Her poetry is desperate and beautiful. It is grief and longing and shadows, glimpsed raw and then quietly healed.

When I woke up I was in a forest. The dark
seemed natural, the sky through the pine trees
thick with many lights.

I knew nothing; I could do nothing but see.
And as I watched, all the lights of heaven
faded to make a single thing, a fire
burning through the cool firs.
Then it wasn't possible any longer
to stare at heaven and not be destroyed.