beauty in books

Words dance on my fingertips like fireflys daring to escape the confines of a jelly jar.

Sometimes, I let them free but other times, I am selfish, letting their light play across my face for awhile longer.

Writing is like giving birth, confessing your deepest secrets and pouring out a part of yourself all at once. It's making the private public, the secretive well-know.

At times, it feels like extracting the part of me that is the darkest, but often, I am capturing a bouncing fragment of light from my soul and trapping it long enough to understand it well enough to cement it in words.

The pen is mightier than the sword, and the written word can move mountains, end wars and express emotions.

Poetry can capture the beauty of nature, the passion of love or the devastation of death. The rhythym can release a tulmultuous flood of feelings over a reader, and, with each recitation, a new facet is revealed to cherish and to explore.

Me? I am content to read Anne Sexton's confessional poetry and marvel at the images it incites. Her image of Jesus in the grave provokes me to thought. She says she could never bring herself to believe, but oh, I think her poetry is her version of praise...its beauty is undisputable. Whether she actually came to faith remains uncertain, but her suicide tends to make the needle point towards the negative.

If only she had believed!

Well, maybe her poetry would not have been so melodramatic and twistedly beautiful, but it's a small price to pay.

I would sit there for hours, in my soft bed, reading her poems over and over to press the images into the folds of my mind permanently. Fragments of her poetry hurtle at me from time to time, but the context is often lost. How I love to revisit that dusty, slim volume of poetry and pour over the dog-eared pages to dip my fingers into the genius of a tragic poetess like her.

Literature and poetry are two of my greatest loves. The written word can be skewed, twisted and molded to say whatever you want. Never take that for granted. I know I never will.