XX
Don September 16th, 2008
XX Wordsworth wrote an endless poem in blank verse on” the growth of a poet’s mind.” I shall attempt a more modest feat for a more distracted age: a blog, “Things which a Lifetime of Trying to Be a Poet has Taught Me.”
Our base of operations in Cartagena, Colombia, on that South American tour, was a hotel from which we could walk straight out onto the beach and gaze North across the Gulf of Mexico toward home, which lay over the horizon. There is nothing better than the rhythm of the surf to get one in the right frame of mind for practicing the rhythms of poetry, and capturing the spirit of poetry too.
Choir of stars and the sea
To the rhythm of my feet on the sand:
This is the music that follows me
And calls me away from the land.
I hear the waves and feel the spray;
The horizon’s lost in shadows of night.
But there lies a maid who’s as fair as the day,
As fair as the sweet morning light.
The maid turned out not to be so permanent a part of life as I then thought. But the far horizon and the promise of something beckoning from beyond it has turned out to be more so than I could then have imagined.
Donald T. Williams, PhD