Published: April 13, 2009 07:56 am      

On Poetry: Poem for poetry month

Like all good poems, this one makes me see what is true in a way I hadn't seen before. It's by our current U.S. Poet Laureate Kay Ryan, a Californian who taught remedial English part time for more than 30 years. She said at one time that she has never taken a creative writing class, and in a 2004 interview, she noted, "I have tried to live very quietly, so I could be happy."

Ryan says, "Poems are transmissions from the depths of whoever wrote them to the depths of the reader. To a greater extent than with any other kind of reading, the reader of a poem is making that poem, is inhabiting those words in the most personal sort of way. That doesn't mean that you read a poem and make it whatever you want it to be, but that it's operating so deeply in you, that it is the most special kind of reading."

Turtle

Who would be a turtle who could help it?
A barely mobile hard roll, a four-oared helmet,
She can ill afford the chances she must take
In rowing toward the grasses that she eats.
Her track is graceless, like dragging
A packing-case places, and almost any slope
Defeats her modest hopes. Even being practical,
She's often stuck up to the axle on her way
To something edible. With everything optimal,
She skirts the ditch which would convert
Her shell into a serving dish. She lives
Below luck-level, never imagining some lottery
Will change her load of pottery to wings.
Her only levity is patience,
The sport of truly chastened things.
-- Kay Ryan, from Flamingo Watching, Copper Beach Press, 1994

Fleda Brown is professor emerita, University of Delaware, and past poet laureate of Delaware. For more of Fleda Brown's On Poetry columns, log on to record-eagle.com/onpoetry.