Start Your Day with a Poem

Ann (USA)

[Reflection]

I have been examining ‘Poetry in Your Daily Life’ but wanted to overlap it with my daily walks as I need to be away from my screen and desk to help make it through this week.

The city I live in has a Sidewalk Poetry program that 'integrates infrastructure repair with the poetry of the people.' The poems are pressed letterforms in concrete sidewalk squares. The poem closest to my home was marked on the city’s poetry map as ‘requiring reinstallation, future location TBD.’

I visited the poem to see why it requires reinstallation and whether any traces remained in the physical realm. Luckily I could still read the poem. I found it just as marked on the Poetry map, embedded in a concrete square. But the concrete was no longer smooth–it was unevenly disintegrating and pocked, almost like the gravestones with softened and weathered messages.

I could not forget you if I tried.
I have tried.
Benjamin Grimm

The erasure process seemed strangely counter to the poem’s message about not being able to forget.

I then walked to visit the next closest poem. I found the poem helpful to remind me to be patient with the hyperlocal, careful looking approach I am following for my current work.

When the Lotus Bloomed
I was so distracted, tense, and busy
That I missed the lotus bloom.
Though preoccupied and hasty
I sensed something in the room–
Caught that subtle scent of longing,
That mute yearning to be still–
But I hadn’t yet an inkling
That the flower was my will.
Peter Levine
(inspired by Rabindranath Tagore)