Tag: Billy Collins

  • In celebration of National Poetry Month, which starts today, I am going to share daily a poem that I wrote and also daily provide a link to another poem from one of three sites that share a poem each day on each site. Many of mine will be from a poetry reading I did in 2004 at a since-defunct cultural society in suburban Philadelphia where we lived at the time. This was the first one from that reading:

    Poem

    -- after reading
    Tao Te Ching
    translated by
    Stephen Mitchell

    Strain not for the word,
    let it come
    like OM.
    As simple as breath.
    As deadly as
    the viper,
    let it sink its
    skin into your skin
    until you become
    the whisper of
    being,
    non-being
    we all are
    becoming,
    a breath lost
    in the whirlwhind
    nothing more,
    something less by
    less this way
    comes
    glimpses
    of the gone world
    spit out on
    the page.

    This poem should be the way I intended the line breaks in desk or mobile, portrait or landscape, but others I share probably will be best viewed in desktop and sometimes lansdcape. I’ll let you know. Why I’m sharing the link to the poems from the sites is so the line breaks remain according to how the poets formatted their poems. Here’s the first one I’ll share, today a poem by Billy Collins from The Poetry Foundation. Technically, it’s not from the poem a day project, but one I found instead.