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.
Measure by Lorna Crozier
The sun leaning south has a slow drawl, drawing out the day’s vowels, taking longer to say but still saying it. It’s the end of summer, petals closing up, the bones in my wrists the first to feel the possibility of frost. What I’ve read and remember pleases me but has little use—Solzhenitsyn’s sister calling cats the only true Christians or Aldous Huxley, impatient with the coolness of Virginia Woolf, her meanness to a friend, writing in a letter, She’s a jar of ashes. I wish I’d saved my father’s, sealed some in an egg timer and used it as a measure, following the sun’s slide across the windowsill, in slow ease into night. I’m looking more like him, my face getting thinner, m lips more pinched. Still, I love the way the sun moves around lobelia, anemone, geranium, words lasting longer on the warmth and thickness of its tongue. ~ from Whetstone (McClelland and Stewart Ltd, 2005)