POETRY

Readers of poetry often find themselves frustrated because they can't figure out what a poem means.  One reason for this problem is that a poem cannot be translated into everyday English.  It can be read and listened to, thought about, meditated on.  Readers can talk about a poem.  But a poem cannot be paraphrased.  In this poem, the contemporary American poet Billy Collins takes on the problem by imagining talking to students in an introductory course in reading poetry.

Introduction to Poetry

by Billy Collins

I ask them to take a poem

and hold it up to the light

like a color slide

 

or press an ear against its hive.

 

I say drop a mouse into a poem

and watch him probe his way out,

 

or walk inside the poem’s room

and feel the walls for a light switch.

 

I want them to waterski

across the surface of a poem

waving at the author’s name on the shore.

 

But all they want to do

is tie the poem to a chair with rope

and torture a confession out of it.

 

They begin beating it with a hose

to find out what it really means.

 

Here is a poem that my world literature students seem to like:

 The Words Under the Words

by Naomi Shihab Nye

20^th Century, Palestinian/American

for Sitti Khadra, north of Jerusalem

My grandmother’s hands recognize grapes,

the damp shine of a goat’s new skin.

When I was sick they followed me,

I woke from the long fever to find them

covering my head like cool prayers.

My grandmother’s days are made of bread,

a round pat-pat and the slow baking.

She waits by the oven watching a strange car

circle the streets. Maybe it holds her son,

lost to America. More often, tourists,

who kneel and weep at mysterious shrines.

She knows how often mail arrives,

how rarely there is a letter.

When one comes, she announces it, a miracle,

listening to it read again and again

in the dim evening light.

My grandmother’s voice says nothing can surprise her.

Take her the shotgun wound and the crippled baby.

She knows the spaces we travel through,

the messages we cannot send—our voices are short

and would get lost on the journey.

Farewell to the husband’s coat,

the ones she has loved and nourished,

who fly from her like seeds into a deep sky.

They will plant themselves. We will all die.

My grandmother’s eyes say Allah is everywhere, even in death.

When she talks of the orchard and the new olive press,

when she tells the stories of Joha and his foolish wisdoms,

He is her first thought, what she really thinks of is His name.

“Answer, if you hear the words under the words—

otherwise it is just a world with a lot of rough edges,

difficult to get through, and our pockets full of stones.”

Poems also come in the form of song lyrics.  Here is an example I like, "Not Dark Yet," by Bob Dylan.  You can hear him sing it on the Grammy Award-winning album, Time out of Mind.

Copyright © 1997 Special Rider Music