Today is World Poetry Day in many places in the world, and I always see it as an opportunity to pause and connect with the world on a deeper level. So many things happening that we would like to see coming down in a different way considering the historical record we've had to learn from, but oh, well. Read some poetry today, and find some meaning. Read some poetry today, and discover a new way of looking at things. I am a poet, and I read and write some when the force strikes me. I'm not sharing my own today; this isn't a plug. Maybe at some point you will seek it out and read some of it, but today I simply want to share one of my favorite poets, W. B. Yeats. The poem contains one of the most powerful lines I've ever read: We had fed our heart on fantasies, our heart grown brutal from the fare, more substance in our enmities than in our love. Yeah, truth that.
The Stare’s Nest By My Window
The bees build in the crevices
Of loosening masonry, and there
The mother birds bring grubs and flies.
My wall is loosening; honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare.
We are closed in, and the key is turned
On our uncertainty; somewhere
A man is killed, or a house burned.
Yet no clear fact to be discerned:
Come build in the empty house of the stare.
A barricade of stone or of wood;
Some fourteen days of civil war:
Last night they trundled down the road
That dead young soldier in his blood:
Come build in the empty house of the stare.
We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart’s grown brutal from the fare,
More substance in our enmities
Than in our love; O honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare.
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
Happy World Poetry day; words are better as poetry, than words as war. A stare, by the way, is a starling.