I have been meaning to post some poetry all month to celebrate National Poetry Month – and now here it is, the last day of April. Nothing like leaving it until the last minute.
When I attended Artfest at the beginning of the month I discovered that in addition to hosting Artfest, Fort Warden is the home of Copper Canyon Press, an awesome independent publishing house that focuses on poetry. A few years ago a friend and I went to a Margaret Atwood reading in Seattle. The reading was sponsored by Copper Canyon Press and they were also selling a beautiful, limited edition broadside of an unpublished Atwood poem. I couldn’t resist. I bought it, had it framed, and now it hangs in my kitchen, where I read it often. It reminds me of the west coast landscape in which I live, but it also reminds me of the power of growth, of finding the cracks where the light gets in, to borrow a phrase from Leonard Cohen. The last stanza in particular reminds me of my yoga practice. Enjoy the ponderous is.
Lichen and Reindeer Moss on Granite
This is a tiny language,
smaller than Gallic;
when you have your boots on
you scarcely see it.
A scorched brown dialect
or a grey one, brittle
and with many branches
like an old tree’s, bleached and leafless.
In the rain they go leathery,
then sly, like rubber.
They send up their little mouths
on stems, red-lipped and round,
each one pronouncing a syllable,
o, o, o, like the dumbfounded
eyes of minnows.
Thousands of spores, of rumours
infiltrating the fissures,
moving unnoticed into
the ponderous is on the boulder,
breaking down rock.
- Margaret Atwood
