Doc Searls via Compfight
Here is a poem from my writing notebook that I’ve been playing around with. Last night was so beautiful. I stayed outside long after the fire in the fire pit had died down and the stars had come out.
Below the Surface
Blue whales are large,
but not the largest of living things,
though ask anyone and that’s the
first opinion offered; unless
they mention the giant sequoia – if we
make it past our blindness of plants.
But even that behemoth,
towering 350 feet in the air and wide enough
to drive a car through, is dwarfed by
the mass of a simple fungus*
in Oregon, nearly two and a half
miles across and almost entirely
underground, except for the
mushrooms that carpet the ground
when conditions are right.
Who has not wondered, on a warm spring
night while looking at the stars,
whether things are more connected
than they appear, whether what we see is
not what we get, but something
much larger, much grander
than we can imagine?
* Here’s a story about that fungus, if you are interested.
Our blindness, indeed. Of plants, and of all things unseen.
I like how your stanzas break, but also stay connected to each other. Hmm…the theme subtly woven into the form.
While I wrote most of this earlier, I was playing around with stanza and line breaks and was kinda happy with the results. But… experiences like these also have me thinking that I need a mentor/teacher to push me forward. Been reading a lot of poetry — and that’s good for mentorship (and enjoyment!) — but I also think I need a teacher/coach.