Happy 20^th Anniversary, Poem of the Month!
I crafted this found poem to celebrate poetry and poetry lovers, and honor the beloved
Annie Dillard, who died on September 15^th.  I took her words in Writers on Writing as a
manifesto about the alchemy of passion and creativity. Try this: replace Antonio with your
name, and the word draw with Love, Look, or another word that nudges or encourages you,
then write a poem or manifesto. May we give joyfully with conviction and devotion
to our most compelling allurements.

Gratitude without end to you, dear reader, for your abiding love of poetry! OX, Krayna

Give It All
     the great presence / that permitted everything and transmuted it / in poetry was passion.
– W. S. Merwin

One of the few things
I know about life
is this:
spend it, play it, lose it,
right away, every time.
Do not hoard what seems good for later.
Give it, give it all, give it
now. The impulse to save
something good for
a better time
is the signal: spend it
now. Something more
will arise later, filling you
from beneath,
like well water. Anything
you do not give freely
and abundantly
becomes lost to you.
You open your safe
and find ashes.
After Michelangelo died,
someone found a note
to his apprentice
in the handwriting of his old age:
Draw, Antonio, draw, Antonio, draw
and do not waste time.

Found poem inspired by a passage in Annie Dillard’s, The Writing Life. Here’s the original:
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/8608671-one-of-the-few-things-i-know-about-writing-is

I love every line of this poem, how it points to radical trust using a strange metaphor
for blind faith: sleepwalking. Hirsch’s short clauses create images that arrive at mandate
or waking up to ourselves. And the italicized section? O, my heart!
Now, say something wonderful today.  XO

For the Sleepwalkers
Tonight I want to say something wonderful
for the sleepwalkers who have so much faith
in their legs, so much faith in the invisible

arrow carved into the carpet, the worn ath
that leads to the stairs instead of the window,
the gaping doorway instead of the seamless mirror.

I love the way that sleepwalkers are willing
to step out of their bodies into the night,
to raise their arms and welcome the darkness,

palming the blank spaces, touching everything.
Always they return home safely, like blind men
who know it is morning by feeling shadows.

And always they wake up as themselves again.
That’s why I want to say something astonishing
like: Our hearts are leaving our bodies.

of owls, the motion of wind-torn branches.
And now our hearts are thick black fists
flying back to the glove of our chests.

We have to learn to trust our hearts like that.
We have to learn the desperate faith of sleep-
walkers who rise out of their calm beds

and walk through the skin of another life.
We have to drink the stupefying cup of darkness
and wake up to ourselves, nourished and surprised.

By Edward Hirsch, from For the Sleepwalkers.
Copyrighted material, for inspirational purposes only.

Check out the POTM archive.

Image: Night, photo by Harold Ross.

This poem’s a Love Song. It’s for you. Why are we here? It sure as hell isn’t to prove worth
or accumulate stuff. And all the other things we do to ward off pain and death? Exercises in futility.
Do you have to love or feel? Nope. But I’d rather embrace life’s heartaches than live a half-life, starved
or the one thing that makes us rich beyond measure. Avec amour, always. XO

(You are here to) risk your heart

Life will break you. Nobody

can protect you from that, and living

alone won’t either, for solitude

will also break you

with its yearning.

You have to love.

You have to feel.

It is the reason you are here

on earth. You are here

to risk your heart. You are here

to be swallowed up.

And when it happens

that you are broken, or betrayed,

or left, or hurt, or death

brushes near, let yourself

sit by an apple tree and listen

to the apples falling all around you

in heaps, wasting their sweetness.

Tell yourself that you tasted

as many as you could.

Found poem by Krayna Castelbaum; inspired by poet and novelist Louise Erdrich’s novel, The Painted Drum.
Created with line breaks only; no words were added or deleted.

Image credit. Photo taken by moi.

Check out the POTM archive.