Let's face it, poetry to me, used to be a collection of gibberish that requires deep thinking to get to the real meaning (s).
I swear I could never get poetry. I remember reading a few in high school.
If, The Road Not Taken, Monsoon History, Si Tenggang Homecoming and Death In The Opposite House.
I understand them. Oh, the wonders of BUKU RUJUKAN.
But I never cared for them. Poetry is like a bad smell that I knew I had to endure.
Poetry, fortunately is not boring. It's intriguing. Alphabets sewn together to make lines of words.
Lines that are traitorous because they never conform to your understanding. At least to me.
That's why poetry and I don't mix. We will never be on the same page.
And then I changed. Five years of doing literature can do that to you. (pun intended:D)
I stopped worrying about whether my understanding of poems matched with other people.
I realized that I am not like other people. I do not feel like them. I do not think like them. I should dance to my own beat. I have been afraid to break away, scared that my own interpretation is gonna sound silly to the ears of artsy fartsy people.
Oh how wrong I have been.
Poetry is many things to different people.
The beauty of it is..
when it evokes some sort feeling in your heart (or stomach),
when it resembles the story of your life narrated in 10 compact sentences
and especially,
when it gets you through the day like a mojo that unlocks one of the many mysteries of life.
I decided that I do get poetry.
I even like some of them.
I am entitled NOT to like some of them.
I may understand them differently than other people.
But that does not make them right and me, wrong.
Because I am me. Other people will never be a second me.
Yes, just like my dear, dear books,
Poetry let me be me.
Me:)
+++++
Here's a recent favorite:
Here's a recent favorite:
He Wishes For The Cloths Of Heaven by William Butler Yeats
Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
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