The answers are far less certain
than even last week, to all those
perennial questions or solutions
you might seek.
What do you believe, or
what do you believe in?
Come Monday, you have fewer
questions than you had last week.
For a while there are less doubts
in what you believe.
Whom do you believe in,
and who believes in you?
11/18/2024 j.g.l.
We want to know what
we don’t know, or hadn’t thought of,
or forgot.
What mattered then,
or what mattered when, shifts over time.
We notice.
Perception is what you don’t see.
Deception is what know.
You see it differently through your aloneness.
The truth behind a lie,
you question how and why.
It made sense.
Anticipation keeps us waiting
for only so long. Will it matter
if you felt it never did?
© 2021 j.g. lewis
Slow down: even with the ideas that come to quicky. Take the time to acknowledge the feelings that arrive, as they arrive.
Write it down. How else will you remember what you were thinking?
Print neatly. You hardly understand the thoughts at the time, why make it more difficult to comprehend weeks or years from now?
Follow your own logic; only you need to truly make sense of what is happening, or all that has happened.
Pay attention to the lessons of the past. Be mindful that not all are worth repeating.
Clarity. Make corrections as you go. Flaws become more difficult to correct the longer you live with them.
11/14/2024 j.g.l.
I'm like a pencil;
sometimes sharp,
most days
well-rounded,
other times
dull or
occasionally
broken.
Still I write.
j.g. lewis
is a writer/photographer in Toronto.
If I were organized, or if I were to try and become organized, I would bookend my ever-expanding poetry collection with Mary Oliver and Billy Collins.
Each poet, each of them American (coincidently), represents dedication to the craft of poetry.
Both poets present captivating, assessable, relevant words that confront and comfort life in a manner we can all understand.
Few poets can consistently capture a range of emotion without overstepping the bounds.
Oliver died this week from lymphoma. There was an immediate sadness felt world-wide, and expressed so openly on social and traditional media, in coffee shops and bookstores.
The Pulitzer prize-winning writer was, indeed, among my favorites, and will remain such. She now becomes one of those dead poets we will read a little deeper as she has gone from reminding us of the times we live in, to being a reminder.
There is history in poetry, a truth and accuracy you don’t find in encyclopedias.
Oliver’s skill was obvious and incomparable, though I can’t help but measure her words to other writers that totally capture my imagination.
Oliver wrote poems more emotionally resplendent than Emily Dickinson, with the breadth of situation and circumstance of Dorianne Laux, though more diligently compact. Her obvious respect for nature was of the magnitude of William Wordsworth. Wordsworth wrote as he saw; Oliver, how she felt.
Mary Oliver wrote as she lived, and she lived for us all.
We have been blessed.
01/20/2019 j.g.l.
I’m like a pencil;
sometimes sharp,
most days
well-rounded,
other times
dull or
occasionally
broken.
Still I write.
j.g. lewis
is a writer/photographer in Toronto.