Wednesday, July 13, 2016

The things we learned so far (Festival of words, day 4)



Today... revisiting a poem I wrote in April, during National Poetry Month, inspired by a Found Poetry Prompt Generator. I changed it slightly now for the Festival of Words. Here's the original version: Angelfish & Borrowing.

*

The Things We Learned So Far 

It was about that time a week ago when it happened:
A long distance call in the evening
From a stranger who asked about the
Experience of being human,
The things we learned so far,
not from borrowed catalogues of knowledge
but from real day-by-day life

I went and tackled the questions, tried
To analyze, to think quickly.
Yes, of course, I said. The daily life, it is
A flame in our hands, the hourly glow of everything, the
troubles of the human condition, all our new dreams and worries,
methods and hopes, highways and lost places.
Just consider the care it takes to get
Proper strength, the ends through which all is connecting,
The gamble of living wortwhile.

In that manner I kept talking until the party
On the other end of the line hung up.  
Then I sat down to write three long letters to myself,
Each with a moral, later collected by and large
In a file possibly named
Slow learning


No comments: