Grounded

Many of you may know I am an avid bike rider and living in Minnesota makes the summer riding days quite precious. So when the doc says, "You're grounded. On the shelf. No cycling for at least 6 weeks", my heart sunk. The bicycle is my refuge, my path to serenity, a bulwark against the Black Dog.  And to compound matters, my mobility is pretty limited.  Angst.

But I have something in my repertoire that helps keeps me calm.  (That's an overstatement, but it has helped me to accept the one-day-at-a-time endurance contest.) 

That something is poetry.

When I was in high school, poetry was my most unfavorite unit in the English curriculum.  I held to the nerd maxim .. 'Science strives to describe complex concepts so they are understandable to all, while poetry reverses that'. I was unappreciative. The classic poems we were asked to read seemed so obscure as to be gobbledygook. When reading poem aloud, I floundered, hitting the end of a line of poetry, and, alas, discovering too late that it keeps going to the next line - or 2.  Where's the punctuation?  Impossible to read or comprehend.

At some point, rather late in life, poetry became an important contributor to my well being. Scales fell away. Now, a day without a poem is like an overcast day. (Obviously, while my poem reading is robust, my poem writing is weak.)  

I tend to read anthologies and there are still poems, perhaps the majority, that leave me unmoved. But, Sometimes (Sheenagh Pugh) I bump into a poem like that one of hope. Or a poem that  brings an unexpected a laugh like Soybeans (Thomas Orr) or insight like Living in the Body (Joyce Suthpen) or comfort like Psalm 23  (Bay Psalm Book) or a tear like Shifting the Sun ((Der-Hovanessian) or awe like Courage (Anne Sexton). Treasures.

Slow down. Relax. Read a poem.

Copyright ©  2023  Dave Hoplin