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.
Little Things by Sharon Olds
After she’s gone to camp, in the early evening I clear our girl’s breakfast dishes from the rosewood table, and find a small crystallized pool of maple syrup, the grains standing there, round, in the night, I rub it with my fingertip as if I could read it, this raised dot of amber sugar, and this time when I think of my father, I wonder why I think of my father, of the beautiful blood-red glass in his hand, or his black hair gleaming like a broken-open coal. I think I learned to love the little things about him because of all the big things I could not love, no one could, it would be wrong to. So when I fix on this tiny image of resin or sweep together with the heel of my hand a pile of my son’s sunburn peels like insect wings, where I peeled his back the night before camp, I am doing something I learned early to do, I am paying attention to small beauties, whatever I have—as if it were our duty to find things to love, to bind ourselves to this world.
~ from Strike Sparks: Selected Poems 1980-2002
(Knopf Publishing Group, 2004)