When you get to be old and burdened with deteriorating health like I am, you appreciate the renewal of spring with a new intensity. This year has been like that. Cold weather and dehydrating cold were worse this winter than I can remember… especially since I feel it in the marrow of my bones now more than ever before. But the inevitable rebirth did eventually come. The apple tree my wife planted in the hope that Texas heat would not destroy it is putting out more blossoms than ever before.
The first flowers to put out their winter-weary heads this year were relatively stupid daffodils. They came out in February only a day before an ice storm came along to slay them for their daffy dunderheadedness. I didn’t take their demise very well. I suffered a lot this winter and was looking for the sun with desperation.
But then, in March, dandelions poked out their bright, dandy heads and decided to stay.
And, though we have had plenty of wet weather and rain, the flowers apparently all had a big meeting and decided the time had come to make their yearly assault and wrench the world out of the hands of Jack Frost and his icy minions.
Wisteria began climbing the back corner of the house. They like to spread their purple majesty out over the area by the cracked and derelict swimming pool. It is moist and shaded out there, somewhat protected from our cruel Texas sun.
My wife’s bed of roses, both red and yellow marched out into the open air and began to dance gently in the wind like grand ladies decked out in their Easter best , showing off their color and their sass for all the world to see.
I am coming back now too… less seriously depressed. I completed a doll collection last week. The educational problems my children were facing are now seemingly straightening out. It is a time of rebirth… happiness… and flowers. My smile has returned.
Catch a Falling Star 
Get Up and Do!
It is daunting when bad fortune comes in waves, drowning us in debt, suffering, disabling illness, financial reversals, and so many more things I have been through this last year personally, so that we want to lie down and never get up.
But, I am not dead yet… and there is poetry to be lived.
I say that as one of the world’s fifty worst poets who ever lived. (In my defense, I am a humorist, and I write bad poetry on purpose.) My inspiration for the living of poetry comes from reading and living good poetry. I live because there is poetry by Walt Whitman. Of course, also Shakespeare… whoever he really was. And I understand that much of what I have learned in my brief and stupidly-lived 61 years comes from the poetry of the visionary poet I pictured above. Do you know him? If you have never read his poetry, you haven’t truly lived the poetry you need to live.
This poet taught me that “Being, not doing, is my first love.” Of course, if I am satisfied with just sitting on my bed and “being” through most of my day, I will starve to death and not “be” anymore. But he has taught me that what is essential is already within me. There is wisdom and power in Uncle Ted’s poetry. (Yes, I know I am not really related to him, but that’s only physical and overlooks the spiritual.) I must partake of it to live.
If you are bored by poetry about plants in a greenhouse under bright lights, or you can never understand what the poet means when he says, “My father was a fish”, then you need to practice reading poetry more. You don’t truly understand what poetry is, and what it is for… yet.
And I am sure you have probably concluded from all of this that I am a fool and a bad poet and I have no right to try to tell you who and what a truly great poet is. But, fool that I am, I know it when I see it. It is there in the verse, the hideous and horrible… the beautiful and the true. And if I know anything at all worth telling about the subject, it is this; Ted Roethke is a great American poet. And he writes poetry that you need to read… and not only read but live.
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Filed under artists I admire, commentary, insight, inspiration, poetry, strange and wonderful ideas about life
Tagged as living poetry, poetry, Theodore Roethke