Poet Jane Hirshfield said "... the feeling I have about poem-writing (is) that it is always an exploration, of discovering something I didn't already know. Who I am shifts from moment to moment, year to year. What I can perceive does as well. A new poem peers into mystery, into whatever lies just beyond the edge of knowable ground."
I bring a different poem to the writing classes each week, not only to inspire but to introduce new poets to the group members.
Inheritance by W. S. Merwin
At my elbow on the table it lies open as it has done for a good part of these thirty years ever since my father died and it passed into my hands this Webster’s New International Dictionary of the English Language of 1922 on India paper which I was always forbidden to touch for fear I would tear or somehow damage its delicate pages heavy in their binding this color of wet sand on which thin waves hover when it was printed he was twenty-six they had not been married four years he was a country preacher in a one-store town and I suppose a man came to the door one day peddling this new dictionary on fine paper like the Bible at an unrepeatable price and it seemed it would represent a distinction just to own it confirming something about him that he could not even name now its cover is worn as though it had been carried on journeys across the mountains and deserts of the earth but it has been here beside me the whole time what has frayed it like that loosening it gnawing at it all through these years I know I must have used it much more than he did but always with care and indeed affection turning the pages patiently in search of meanings ~ from The Shadow of Sirius (Copper Canyon Press, 2008)