Editor’s note: Meridian expresses thanks to Richard Eyre for sharing a weekly poem each of these last ten weeks of the year. To read the nine earlier poems in this series click here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. Have you enjoyed them and would you like to see them continue, perhaps on a less frequent basis? Reply directly to Richard at the email mentioned in his context note below.
Poet’s context: As I finish this poetry series to end the year, I want to write personally about poetry itself. These two short poems appear in the preface of my only published book of poetry which is called, creatively, POEMS, and is available HERE or HERE.
Please let me know personally at Dr*******@***il.com (a pen name) if you would like to see this poetry series continue in Meridian—and how often you would like to see a poem appear.
180
What happened was,
After fifty books,
I got tired of writing prose.
Or maybe I just wanted
A Change.
Or got put off by the
Potential for Prescriptiveness
In Prose.
Or perhaps I was humbled
Or right-brain-tugged toward
Wanting to observe
More than to teach.
Whatever it was, I turned seventy
And started anew.
Prose to poetry is not
A little shift in style;
It is a 180.
You don’t write poems,
You capture them.
You don’t create them;
You can’t even look for them.
They come to you.
As Pablo Neruda said:
“And it was at that age…
Poetry arrived
In search of me.”
Two Ways
There are two ways of writing:
Prose to explain,
And poetry to feel.
There are two ways of thinking:
Left-brain logic,
And right-brain intuition.
There are two ways of knowing:
Senses and the empirical, and
Spirit and the inspirational.
There are two ways of doing:
Physical force, and
Mental Fashioning.
There are two ways of building:
Mechanical technology, and
Organic chords.
There are two ways of creating:
Work and plan, and
Watch and pray.
Perhaps we come here,
Into mortality,
To learn the firsts,
So that we can appreciate
And gradually gravitate
Toward the seconds.
