I'm doing a lot of "tasting life twice" these days, not only writing these first-draft-thoughts here, but also trading poems and song lyrics with my daughter in a private blog, and I participate in two writing groups (one that meets monthly, one semimonthly), sharing poetry that I am working on or have honed as much as I can.
Writing IS healing, and more and more I see evidence of this outside of my personal experience. (Besides many others, there's Kim Rosen's SAVED BY A POEM and John Fox's FINDING WHAT YOU DIDN'T LOSE and his Institute of Poetic Medicine.) My next-door neighbor, who's become one of my mentors, writes beautiful essays full of humor and provoking thoughtfulness that make her audience wish for more. However, she reads her pieces to us and tells us that she has no desire to publish them. We cannot even hold her words in our hands.
Words flee from us, just like the moment
when we first understood
and tried to write down what that was
but the images
only suggest it all
and in memory
the edges become blurry.
Nevertheless,
we were happy
for a moment.
