Poetic Medicine

Poem below is from the website, for The Institute for Poetic Medicine - To Awaken Soulfulness in the Human Voice, www.poeticmedicine.org

Say this:

...say threshold, cottonmouth, Russian leather,
say ash, picot, fallow deer, saxophone, say kitchen sink.
This is a birthday party for the mouth—it's better than ice cream,
say waterlilly, refrigerator, hartebeest, Prussian blue
and the word will take you, if you let it,
the word will take you along across the air of your head
so that you're there as it settles into the thing it was made for,
adding to it a shimmer and the bird song of its sound...

--Marilyn Krysl from Saying Things

The first book I purchased when I moved to Washington state, over a decade ago, was a book about poetry. The title of the book is what caught my eye rather than the subject. Finding What You Didn't Lose: Expressing Your Truth and Creativity Through Poem-Making by John Fox.

I have yet to do much more than thumb through it though it is a wonderful, rich book.

I still remember finding it on a shelf in a small bookstore area that resided over an artist co-op store in Olga on Orcas Island. There was (is it still there??) a cafe attached to the store that baked their own cinnamon rolls. Beautiful handcrafted art wrapped in cinnamon.

Yesterday, I started reading another book by John called Poetic Medicine: The Healing Art of Poem-Making. Right after the title page, I found the poem below(which I loved):


The Sleepless Ones

What if all the people
who could not sleep
at two or three or four
in the morning
left their houses
and went to the parks
what if hundreds, thousands,
millions
went in their solitude
like a stream
and each told their story
what if there were
old women
fearful if they slept
they would die
and young women
unable to conceive
and husbands
having affairs
and children
fearful of failing
and fathers
worried about paying bills
and men
having business troubles
and women unlucky in love
and those that were in physical
pain
and those who were guilty
what if they all left their houses
like a stream
and the moon
illuminated their way and
they came, each one
to tell their stories
would these be the more troubled
of humanity
or would these be
the more passionate of this world
or those who need to create to live
or would these be
the lonely
ones
and I ask you
if they all came to the parks
at night
and told their stories
would the sun on rising
be more radiant and
again I ask you
would they embrace

~ Lawrence Tirnauer