Some things you know all your life...

I found a gorgeous poetry blog yesterday and have been up to my heart and soul in lines like...

I want the pepper’s fury and the salt’s tenderness.

I want the virtue of the evening rain, but not its gossip.

I want the moon’s intuition, but not its questions.

I want the malice of nothing on earth.

I want to enter every room in a strange electrified city

and find you there

and...

...just pay attention, then patch

a few words together and don’t try
to make them elaborate, this isn’t
a contest but the doorway

into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.

Here's the thing. I work in a newsroom. I am bombarded by war and rebellion and natural disasters. I've made special reports on Egypt and dispassionately updated the number of deaths in Libya.

Despite the fact that some of the best poems are born during the bleakest of times, poetry for me is a refuge. It is also an addiction and a breath taker.

It's easy to explain it as plain old romanticism, and maybe it is just that. I'm not sure though, if the shiver I get while looking at...

What if by story you mean the shortcut home,
but I mean voices in a room by the sea
while days go by?...

can be explained away at all. And maybe it doesn't need to be. Maybe it's sufficient to say that when Mary Oliver says...

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

...life resumes its urgency and its peace

And when Neruda writes...

because of you, the heady perfumes of summer pain me; because of you, I again seek out the signs that precipitate desire: shooting stars, falling objects

...

...I fall just that little bit more in love

Enough said :)

Here's the link:

http://nataliejabbar.wordpress.com