Consciousness Seeds

Poetry seems to me more physical than intellectual. A year or two ago, in common with others, I received from America a request that I would define poetry. I replied that I could no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat, but that I thought we both recognized the object by the symptoms, which it provokes in us.

Alfred Edward Housman, the classical scholar and poet, was born in Worcestershire, England. Housman was the main character in the 1997 Tom Stoppard play, The Invention of Love. Housman wrote an early 1900s collection of poetry called, A Shropshire Lad. A wall hanging was created for A Shropshire lad, and it now hangs in St. Laurence Church in Ludlow, England.

Poetry floats above our beliefs structure, and it creates a cloud of thoughts that showers our objective world with subjective hail. The hail melts and our belief system floods with new roots. Those roots move to the rhythm of our consciousness. We feel the need to explore these roots, even though we have a hard time accepting them.

Poetry defies the collective conforming creature in us and shakes us awake. Every poem drenches us in the knowledge of nothing, but the pureness of our own freedom. The freedom to perceive and interpret it in an individual way.

We recognize poetry by its consciousness symptoms. Poems are consciousness seeds that dwell outside the rigid walls of our beliefs. They wait for a crack to appear in that guarded wall, and then they fill it with awareness.