Negotiating the Weary

Negotiating the Weary

 

 

How to read poetry indeed. I wanted to share first off that the anxiety of returning to school to be and do Poetry with a capital ‘P’ has me all wound up. I am facing down some demons of sorts by entering into the academy as a POET. A poet who only believed she could write poetry because she learned of adults in Central America learning literacy and revolution through poetry.  Because of poetry with no rules, but baptized in the comfort of oral tradition. Because of community based poets telling it like it is from the heart. Only learning of poetry from living poets mouths.

I sit down to read poetry. Even though the words like to dance out of place when I read or hold them down for enough time to get a sentence out.

It seems fitting, anxious as I am that the first set of poems from Langston Hughes speaks of dreams, growing older and claiming a place in society that keeps you at the margins. Hughes writes “Help me to shatter this darkness, to smash this night, To break this shadow into a thousand lights of sun, into a thousand whirling dreams of sun!” These metaphors speak to me. I feel the weight. Only a few lines before he says he is the shadow lying in the darkness of a wall that is keeping Hughes from his dreams.