POETRY IS LIKE A WILD ANIMAL

                        POETRY IS LIKE A WILD ANIMAL

Poetry can attack injustices, without regard to pleasing the listener

Just as a wild animal is depressed & unhappy when trapped in a cage

  Where he/she has no freedom to roam, to explore, to follow his natural instincts

So, too, the poet is restless and even despondent when not allowed to express

   her passion, her aspirations, her reality in words.

She longs to be heard and acknowledged in a culture that usually ignores her.

Is she really retired, or just weary of no one listening, no one giving her support

   So she can practice her calling, her craft?

A wild animal has mystery, grace, a presence no longer found if her habitat is removed,

   Her survival is at risk.   She is not welcome where humans choose to encroach on her domain.  So often she no longer has a place to call home, a place where she is safe to raise her family and watch them become independent.

The poet too can feel displaced, expected to follow the rules that domesticate her free spirit.  If she has no mate, she must find ways to support and protect herself, and does so however she can.  Or, as many have done, she takes her life or quietly becomes silenced.

To be a poet is often a very solitary, disciplined existence, yet many of us yearn for community, for a sense of belonging.

We want people who care about us even if they have no idea the passion within us.

Poets use language to create possibilities and express feelings that many may have, but often cannot express.  Only in recent decades have women poets risen to be heard in this country.  For centuries, poetry has been the domain of men.

            My grandmother kept letters dating back to the 1700’s, and compiled them in her eighties.  They tell the stories of so many women whose roles were defined by being wives, mothers and daughters, with so little chance to explore the workings of their own minds beyond sending letters that often took months to reach their kinfolk. It seems poetry was a luxury reserved for the men like Shakespeare, Byron, Tennyson, Keats, and Shelley.  When one bears and raises many children, or dies in childbirth or from illness, it would be tough to access the poet within.  Many of the women English novelists remained single to give attention to their craft.  Like Jo, in Little Women, one had to be spirited and wild to consider being an author!  This paragraph belongs in an essay someday, but is included to say there may be an ancestral thread that goes back generations to having the discipline and inclination to write creatively.  It skipped the family I grew up in, but it is there in The Hudson Saga of my paternal grandmother because she took the time to preserve this history.  Thank you, Nana Hatch!  I didn’t get to see your wild or free spirit, your creative side that may have died with the wartime death of your son, my father, in 1944.  Your diaries told of the deep grief you carried, with no one to really hear you or comfort you.  Some of my passion about the devastating effect of war on families comes from personal experience.

       This commentary was inspired initially by noticing how passive and inactive my indoor cat is compared to a cat in the wild, like a lion free to roam compared to being in a zoo.  Also Bianca has no social life with a fellow cat, because where I live I can only have one pet, so her life is very restricted.