I hate poetry.
I love Billy Collins.
Anything with his name, I will read. He makes it real without all that rhyming going on. Dr Suess is about all I can handle and, in small amounts. Billly Collins is the Real Deal, there is no turning away evern when it is hard and hurts. Something to learn, something to beleive in and something to be thankful for.
Anytime something teaches you something that you felt was worth your time, you tend to pay attention. Over and over again. Statues in the Park is a wonderful piece and it doesn't hurt that it comes from the book, The Trouble With Poetry.
Statues in the Park
I thought of you today
When I stopped before an equestrian statue
in the middle of a public space.
you who had once instructed me
in the code of these noble poses.
A horse rearing up with two legs raised,
you told me, meant the rider had died in battle.
If only one leg is lifted,
the man had elsewhere succumbed to his wounds;
and if four legs were touching the ground,
as they were in this case-
bronze hooves affixed to a stone base-
it meant that the man on the horse,
this one staring intently
over the closed movie threatre across the street,
had died of a cause other than war....
The poem doesn't end there but goes on to talk about others who have died in battle yet no statues for them. The statues of the sickly, the suicides, the murdered and the drowned. And, he ends it like this.
And there was I.
up on a rosy-gray block of granite
near a cluster of shade trees in the local park,
my name and dates pressed into a plaque,
down on my knees, eyes lifted,
praying to the passing clouds,
forever begging for just one more day.
