While I love tea, poetry is my first love.
I’ve written my life into poetry since I first learned to write and have never been able to find a cure for the compulsion. If you are also a lover of spilled ink, here is a collection for you to explore.
Side note: some of these pieces will be featured in a future selection of greeting cards in the shop.
Poetry
This collection is called The Poetry Box because it’s those pieces that reach deep for the beauty in life instead of pulling out the darkness. Both are invaluable in poetry and I write both, but these are the poems I would put in a box on a street corner.
This is a thing, yes, and you can read about what a poetry box is and the people who are the inspiration behind poetry boxes here.
The rest of my published poetry collection is on Substack. Feel free to explore the archives there and, if you like what you see, subscribe to support my work. I have a fascination with mythology and story, and occasionally I share a piece that’s more story than poem. Writing and curating these pieces is a work of love for me and there is no charge, but your support means a lot. Subscribers receive a writing piece delivered to their email inbox every weekend.
There’s no promise that these pieces will be something you’d want to display in a poetry box.
A few thoughts on poetry
I often hear people say they don’t understand poetry, so they don’t read it. I don’t think any poet, no matter how prolific or famous, would say they understand poetry. Poetry is not something to be parsed out into a Power Point presentation or written into a story with a beginning and an ending.
There are no beginnings and endings in a poem.
Poems hold a life of their own, for as a poem is coming to life it often becomes something outside of the poet’s control. And while speaking one thing to one person, it often speaks something entirely different to another.
Being a poet, to me, is not something esoteric or strange. It is simply a way of being in the world. It’s living an ordinary working life while deeply feeling the way the lights and shadows land.
Perhaps I am just trying to name this world into which I have been born.
“Our earth is round, and, among other things, that means that you and I can hold completely different points of view and both be right. The difference of our positions will show stars in your window I cannot even imagine. Your sky may burn with light, while mine, at the same moment, spreads beautiful to darkness. Still we must choose how we separately corner the circling universe of our experience. Once chosen, our cornering will determine the message of any star and darkness we encounter.”
-June Jordan
