Poetry

Maybe it’s because their sense of wonder has not been tamped down by too many peeks behind the wizard’s curtain, or maybe it’s because their language has not been clogged up with convention and cliché. Whatever it is, children and teens seem to have a felicity with poetry that adult poets can spend their careers trying to recapture.

Writers in the Schools (WITS), a local nonprofit organization, actively encourages children (K-12) in over 350 area classrooms to develop those skills. Each April, WITS celebrates National Poetry Month by sharing some of the students’ work with the community through its Poem A Day project. We at Harris County Public Library are excited to participate in this year’s event. Starting this Monday, April 2 and running through the month, fans of HCPL’s facebook page will get to read these inspiring poems.

It’s like this: for a very long time, we are not here; then we are here but not for very long; then we are not here for the longest time. Some people know the general whereabouts of “not here.” Myself…I haven’t the foggiest.

What I do know is that the poet, Wislawa Szymborska, is not here anymore.

People who really knew her—the people who liked or didn’t like her cooking, who worried that she smoked too much, who had to sit and listen to her talk through the years of not writing after she won the Nobel Prize—will be allowed to cry and howl and shuffle around their flats in bedraggled flannel robes as long they need to. That is their right because they knew and loved her.

You can see them in our landscape, in place names like Anahuac, Wichita Falls and Navasota. You can see them in our language, in the words shack, lagniappe and totem. They are in the food we eat—they were first to cultivate potatoes, corn, coffee, and chocolate. They had empires, architecture, science, mathematics and art to rival anything in their conquerors’ lands.

When we think of the poet H. D. (born Hilda Doolittle) we see her as through a prism, or perhaps more fittingly as the subject of a cubist portrait. She is fragmentary--a series of planes that don't quite make a whole but which carry undeniable significance.