April 2, 2012

• WHY A POEM—OR A CAT?

    “It’s what kids once learned a long time ago. . .what this nation
  was founded on–morality, memorization of poetry, learning to read
  aloud, to do arithmetic, and to do what literate people do in society.”

  —Marva Collins.

  

   “I still don’t see why anyone would ever
            read a poem,”
  the young man, student, told us on TV.
  Answers came lame, and all the wrong
             protesting ones.

  I would have said, why, one would read a poem
  for the reason you might watch a cat—
  its grace notes curling, stretching, those
              little hairs, sunburst
  on haunches, stone-lion-crouched,
  the quivering intelligent tail, the eyes,
              marble-miraculous gleaming.

  “But what’s the use of it?”

  No use. No use in tapping your foot in time
              to tunes,
  or driving along, car windows down, wind in your
              hair,
  and the smell of river bottoms and plowed fields,
              or even fertilizer.

  You’d read a poem to delight the ear and eye,
  for something to wonder about,
  to take a moment out, to touch what’s real
  that you don’t have to; watching flocks
              of small birds wheeling
  on sluices of the air we breathe,
  or hawk or eagle, plummeting,
  or motionless aloft on that same air.

  To put a frame around this moment, tape it down
              and get a handle on it.

  Like stroking that sweet feline in your lap.

   

  — Harriet Stovall Kelley
  (1933 –    )

   

  This poem won The Inez Puckett McEwen Memorial Award, 1989, awarded by the Poetry Society of Texas. 

   

  Photo Credit: “Athena”
  Margaret Jordan
  Summer 1984 

  • 11:39 am
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