katfireblade

I found mom's old poetry book today, the one she started me on so long ago. It was loved and battered and bruised, but well cared for for many years. However, even the best cared for books, if well loved and well used, eventually...just wear out. Its front cover and binding are gone, the pages are yelowed and rounded, there's old bookmarks and pencil marks everywhere. In this book I found the first poems that ever made me laugh, or cry, or feel. She would read from it to me when I was little, just like she read me the Illiad and the Oddessy, and if she ever gets rid of this book, it will be like getting rid of an old friend. I would so mourn its passing.

My interest in poetry waned over my school years, where my love of it turned mostly to dread, like so many school children's do. No one, it seems, understands poetry, there is a right and wrong answer, and the kids always seem to get it wrong. And we all hate it so, always being wrong.

Years later in college a very wise teacher I knew explained it to me, and again my opinion of it was shifted anew. He said that poetry was hated not for itself, but for the way it was taught. It was taught like a math problem, with right and wrong answers, when in fact poetry wasnt like a story, or like algebra, or constructing a house. In a story, succint events lead one to the other, and there is an ending, a point it closes. You ask people what the story was trying to say, or what it was about, and pretty much everybody will come up with the same answer. Stories are built that way. Algebra, constructing a house, other things we learn, are also very point A, point B, point C, and get result or conclusion D. Its a ladder, and you climb it to the top.

Despite there being moralistic poems and story poems which fall more into that catagory, poetry itself isnt like that at all. Instead, its a response to a stimulus; its a snippit of emotion or thought, frozen in time; its the flash on a camera, there and gone again, and your eyes dazzled as you try to say what you saw. Poetry is the word equivalent to paintings. Some are lush and obvious pictures, some only seem obvious but are filled with symbolism and hidden meaning, some are abstract, and you need to draw your own conlusions, and some are just like photographs, what you see is what you get. But they cant be encapsulated by "yes-no" answers, and all those "wrong" students in class--likely werent. Its subjective, a matter of opinion and emotion, of life experience of where you've been and where you are going. And a system based on "yes-no," "right-wrong" has a veryt hard time teaching that. How does one grade an opinion?

So instead, it ruins a lot of people on poetry for good.

And after I realized how right he was, and how that had pretty much been exactly my experience, I felt my interest spark again. I would go to bookstores and browse the peotry sections, I would read and re-read my mothers old peotry books, I would read them online. But I almost never bought them, and almost no poetry made it into my home. Ask me tales and fables and song, and I can cast so many stories from my head it would frighten you. I know by heart Aesop's fables that you dont even know exist. But not the poetry. I rekindled interest, but love was taking longer.

And then, my grandfather, Christmas before last, standing in the middle of the room, reciting poetry to all the family. And he's getting old, the poems he could say backwards in his sleep are starting to slip now as he grows close to his 80th year, but it didnt matter. As he spoke them, his children recited right along with him, word perfect. And it was mom, always mom, who spoke the lines aloud when he faltered, not just to herself on the sidelines. And when grandad is too old to remember, or when he passes, I know who will recite them then, at family gatherings, at Christmas. Mom will.

And someone else I know, someone who reminded me so much of this old man--hair still dark, though not ungreyed, tipsy on a couple glasses but with a voice and mind still strong, even now when many other old people are bedridden or always confused--started to quote poetry to me. In his voice and his eyes was the same passion my grandfather always had, the same love of the flowing word, and in that and in more ways than that he reminded me of one of my favorite men in the world, and the one I respected the most of almost anybody I know. And I listened with the same enraptured passion I had always listened to my grandfather.

And I remembered. Grandad spoke that night, and his children spoke along with him. When he is gone, someone will recite the poetry, it will carry on. But none of their children did, not even me. They spoke and the rest of the room was silent. When grandad is gone, when mom is gone, who will pass on the torch then? Who will be the one to be in the middle of the room, tipsy on a couple, voice strong and eyes on fire, reciting liquid words to enraptured children, and spark in them fires of their own?

And I knew the answer.

I will.

Mom's old book is faded and worn to almost nothing. And I know my gift to her, I have seen it leatherbound and beautiful, and when I can afford it, it will be her surprise inside a stocking or a birthday box. And when that day comes I might actually cry to see this one go, might actually try to save it from her. I might burn it or bury it with ritual, or just keep it around as a keepsake, but I would never callously throw it away to be sent to a landfill, its meant too much to me.

I have the book in my lap now. I have a copy of it in my bin, I know not where, and I miss it. I am getting my fix off it before I go, which will be soon. Mom is sending poetry books to my boy, to kindle in him the fires grandad kindled in all of us long ago, and one of my own first gifts to him was a book of poems as well. Its family to us, an irrevocable piece of our history and our identity, and Drew should be a part of that as well. I will also send him the Illiad and the Oddessy, and Grimm's Tales, and Aesop's Fables, because he is my child, and these are a part of me.

Funny, the things that become precious to you, that become a piece of you, even when you arent looking.