I loved Brian Doyle’s writing from the first time I read it, and I admire the deep sense of humanity and spirit infused in it. One sadness in his early death is that we don’t get more of his quirkily beautiful essays and poems. (If you don’t know him, try this or this or all of these.)
In this sweet poem, Doyle offers us a child’s voice arguing for the poetry that exists beyond the words we give to it. It’s got me looking around for those poems.
Last night I went shell crafting with my mom in the community center where I took dance lessons as a kid. There were plenty of poems in that room where people turned shells—big and tiny, white and pink and aqua and striped—into flowers, sometimes mounting them into bouquets. But maybe the poem without words existed in the intention with which they bent over the shells, glue guns in hand, imagining them into something new.
Or maybe I’m just trying once again to give language to what doesn’t require it. What wordless poems are in the air of your life this week?
“Maybe there are a lot of poems that you can’t write
Down. Couldn’t that be?”
