23 December 2011

Longing

So it's been a while since I wrote something.

I'd like to say I've been thinking deeply and writing until my hands bleed...but I haven't.

I've been feeling sort of burnt out, distracted, kind of in need of a break from just being myself.

So I saw "The Muppets" and it reminded me of who I was, a long time ago. A kid who identified with Kermit, someone who it just wasn't easy being, but believed that rainbows connected him to dreamers and lovers.

I remembered how much I used to long for things. Not material things, but those romantic things that Jim Henson believed in.

I remembered how sad I was when Jim Henson passed. It was the first celebrity death that really mattered to me.

I remembered why I got into poetry to begin with: the longing.

Every poem I read had some kind of longing in it, seemingly driving it to be written, driving it to be read.

Some poets long for justice, or to understand their place in the universe, or to connect with nature or God. For a long time, I longed for love. So I became a love poet.

And then I fell in love and poetry stopped not because I wasn't writing, but because I wasn't longing.

You try it, you read a poem and tell me if there isn't an element of longing in it somewhere.

In the meantime, here's a poem that a dear friend of mine helped me discover. I think it shows what Rumi longed for, a connnection to everything:

IN THE ARC OF YOUR MALLET
Don’t go anywhere without me.
Let nothing happen in the sky apart from me,
or on the ground, in this world or that world,
without my being in its happening.
Vision, see nothing I don’t see.
Language, say nothing.
The way the night knows itself with the moon,
be that with me. Be the rose
nearest to the thorn that I am.
I want to feel myself in you when you taste food,
in the arc of your mallet when you work,
when you visit friends, when you go
up on the roof by yourself at night.
There’s nothing worse than to walk out along the street
without you. I don’t know where I’m going.
You’re the road and the knower of roads,
more than maps, more than love.
                                                           -Rumi