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.
Worm by Gail McConnell
Burrowing in your allotted patch you move through the dark, muscles contracting one by one in every part, lengthening and shortening the slick segmented tube of you, furrows in your wake. Devising passages for water, air, you plot the gaps that keep the structure from collapse. Dead things you know. Plants and creatures both. Your grooves shift matter, sifting as you go. Eyeless, your appetite aerates. Eating the world, you open it. You ingest to differentiate. Under the foot-stamped earth, you eat into a clot of leaf mould, clay and mildew, and express what you can part with, as self-possessed as when you started. Your secretions bind the soil, your shit enriches it. How things lie now will be undone, will reoccur. You, a surface-level archivist sensing all there is can be gone through. The body borne within its plot. ~ from Fourteen (Green Bottle Press, 2018)