Reply #6: This poem changed my life. [View All]

[hisownpetard]

I sent it to lizziegrace because she's going through a hard time, and I wanted her to read, in particular, these lines:

...The foetus,
expert at attachment,
didn't dream that
cramped canal would open

into sound and light and love—
it clung. It didn't care. The future
looked like death to it, from there.

These are the words that inspired me to make that leap from the bleak certainty of my life, as it was,
to the frightening uncertainty of trying to make it what I wanted it to be.

So many of us are in a cramped, dark place and, instead of taking the risk of leaving what we know, we continue to cling
when actually, on the other side, is life itself.

When I first read this poem, it was 1:00 in the morning and I actually sat up in bed and said, "Wow."
I decided at that moment that I was going to go back to school, at the age of 50, no matter what happened.
Divorce happened (as I knew it would).
I never dreamt, at the moment of that decision, that I would wind up studying with Heather McHugh, the person who wrote the poem
that inspired me to change my life.

Mysterious ways...



:hi: