I don’t identify as a poet but I should probably stop insisting that I don’t write poetry. I do write it, as and when it happens. As Mary Oliver remarks in her interview with Krista Tippet, when she’s reflecting on how she came to compose ‘Wild Geese’, there are poems that ‘just come’.
When I write poetry I require the thoughtfulness that can only come from holding a journal in hand and putting pen to paper. It is not like the speed of writing a story on my computer, where I have to type quickly in order to capture my thoughts before they get away.
When I compose a poem it is a mindful practice, free from ideas or thinking. The poetry I write is spontaneous, in the moment, born of a felt sensation or a particular setting. It is willing itself to be told and rather than being the manufacturer, I become the conduit. The poem moves through me to become what it will be.
In celebration of National Poetry Month, I gift one such poem to you. A rarity in the collected work of this particular author, but never entirely absent.
Majesty
Let me tell you about majesty.
It is not always,
as one may think,
in the towering peaks of snowy mountains
or the crackled bark of hundred year old trees.
Size is not always its dominion.
Indeed, as I walk along
gravel crunching beneath my feet,
it is a call I hear that brings majesty to mind.
Poised and still,
I seek the figure whose click & whirr
can be heard over the rustling of leaves in the Spring breeze.
I search the top of blackberry brambles
and newly budding saplings
catching sight of deceptive bits of leaf.
There it is!
As the clouds cease to obscure the sun,
allowing the light to cast shadows & catch,
for an instant,
a flash of purple.
Head raised high, chest puffed out,
sits the Lord (or lady?) of this particular bramble,
so small as to seem almost mythical.
And yet I can think of no better word than ‘majestic’,
to describe the hummingbird.
Kaitlyn S. C. Hatch
~
Originally published on Medium.