jwjourney.com

I think poetry is perhaps the most beautiful language. When I was younger I dreamed of being a poet, and then reality set in and just as quickly, I stopped writing it and dreaming about being part of its clique. Still, on those occasions when my husband buys me a new book of poems or pulls out one of our old books and starts to read – I’m not lying here, he really does because he loves me that much – I think of all the poems that lived in me and I mourn.

When I first started college, my father bought me a book of contemporary poetry with about 20 different poets. I fell in love with the book. There are two definite reasons for this – one, because besides $20 handshakes before heading back out to school, my father rarely gifted me anything he picked out on his own. It was my mother who bought our gifts, and for this reason, when he bought me something especially, it struck me so deeply I cherished it. I still have the pair of shorts he bought me for my 12^th birthday – purchased while he was in California visiting his sister and father and, he admitted, his sister made – MADE – him buy me a gift when she realized he was out of town for my birthday. Secondly, because I truly grew to love at least half of the poets in that book he gave me. To this day, it is my favorite collection of poems. I have since gone on to purchase books from several of those poets.

And since I have no reason not to, I am going to share part of one of my favorite poems from that book. It is by Adrienne Riche, a beautiful writer who expresses so deeply her feelings for her lover that if you don’t break into tears when you read this, then at least break into a sweat: 

SPLITTINGS

I.

My body opens over San Francisco like the day-

light raining down            each pore crying the change of light

I am not with her            I have been waking off and on

all night to that pain            not simply absence but           

the presence of the past            destructive

to living here and now            Yet if I could instruct

myself, if we could learn to learn by pain

even as it grasps us            if the mind, the mind that lives

in this body could refuse                        to let itself be crushed

in that grasp            it would loosen             Pain would have to stand

off from me and listen            its dark breath still on me

but the mind could begin to speak to pain

and pain would have to answer:

Now…get your own book to read the rest…