Poet Jane Hirshfield said "... the feeling I have about poem-writing (is) that it is always an exploration, of discovering something I didn't already know. Who I am shifts from moment to moment, year to year. What I can perceive does as well. A new poem peers into mystery, into whatever lies just beyond the edge of knowable ground."
I bring a different poem to the writing classes each week, not only to inspire but to introduce new poets to the group members.
Diagnosis by Sharon Olds
By the time I was six months old, she knew something was wrong with me. I got looks on my face she had not seen on any child in the family, or in the extended family, or the neighborhood. My mother took me in to the pediatrician with kind hands, a doctor with a name like a suit size for a wheel: Hub Long. My mom did not tell him what she thought in truth, that I was Possessed. It has just these strange looks on my face— He held me and conversed with me, chatting as one does with a baby, and my mother said, She’s doing it now. Look! She’s doing it now! and the doctor said, What your daughter has is called a sense of humor. Ohhh, she said and took me back to the house where that sense would be tested and found to be incurable. ~ from One Secret Thing (Alfred A Knopf, 2008)