What is poetry? Is it a bunch of words put together to create a short story? To create a description of something or someone you love or don’t? What is it? Poetry?
Poetry isn’t just any word, clustered with other words. Poetry isn’t always a story. Poetry is everything beyond the basic, pen and paper. It’s how you live. It’s in your everyday life.
Poetry is in the way one laughs, so loudly. Kind of how the wind teaches the trees to dance, and to speak. Poetry is in the way one cries, so beautifully. Kind of how the morning dew swells, and forms on a leaf or a blade of grass and drops ever so slowly. Poetry is in the way one walks, so delicately. Kind of how someone places a flower so gently, on a mossy, grave or a deadly quiet, casket. Poetry is in the way one smiles, so luminously. Kind of how the sun hides behind the soft, thick quilt of clouds, grey, because it’s so jealous. Poetry is in the way one lives, so wholly. Kind of how there’s those days better than you can believe, and those days worse than you can imagine.
Anyone can explain what poetry is, or what it may be.
But poetry is within everything. The good, the bad. The inbetween. How someone does things in their own kind of way. The way someone writes their name, the date, and the class period on the assignment they’ve been handed, knowing they probably won’t do; but they try to motivate themselves to do it anyway. How one fiddles with their fingers when they’re nervous. Picking at their nails, repeatedly popping them, and tying the tiny limbs together. Heart beating as fast as the winds racing during a tornado.
Thump-tha-thump-tha-thump.
Kind of like the sound made when you flick your chest and the deep, almost hollow sound, fills the atmosphere of the room. Or when you hit a mattress with an open palm during a fit of rage.
Poetry…
Is me, you, and everything in daily life.
Poetry is everything beyond the basic, pen and paper.