Living Tree Poetry

By Ana Lisa de Jong

Ah poetry,

that anyone takes you seriously.

Or presumes to understand.

That you are completely right
and utterly wrong in the one breath,

makes you so human and divine,
both.

And that is what we love about you,
that you can’t be tamed.

That everything that needs to be spelled out,
is not poetry.

And everything that poetry spells
could be considered incorrect.

In that

there is no one way to say anything.

This truth to which poetry attests.

~

Ask a poet what she means and she’ll say, ‘hmmm’.

She might remember the day she wrote the lines
when the clouds had lowered
their drawbridge into heaven.

Or she might not.

Every poem a daisy chain unfinished,
a link in the chain,
that doesn’t connect back to a beginning,

nor know one end from another.

But ask a poet what she doesn’t mean and she’ll
say, ‘this…’

Ever clear on what is poetry
and what it isn’t.

Ever sure on what life consists of
and what it doesn’t.

Repeating herself
in a thousand different breaths.

~

Ah poetry,

that you have come from heaven
to find me.

That I follow you,
part theologian, part unrequited lover,

ever seeking to woo,
and be wooed.

Catch the elusive, undefinable
presence,

the still, unutterably beautiful
essence.

That defies a definite description,
but seeks out my acquiescence anyway,

our rolling together,
and making honey

as the bees.