Reading poetry can be dangerous, delightful, and inspiring.
One never knows what will jump out of a poem to shred your heart or chill you to your very bone marrow as happens when reading
Pastor Niemoller's First They Came for the Jews, or Bret Harte's What the Bullet Sang. Poetry can be as disarming, delightful,
and romantic as Edward Lear's The Owl and The Pussey Cat; or as funny, crazy and wild as Lawrence Ferlingetti's ode to Chagall in
Don't Let That Horse! Poetry can be pure inspiration too, as William Blake's The Tyger. Reading it we marvel at his vision,
imagery, word choice, compacted thought, and craftsmanship invested in just six four-line verses. Finally, consider the
perfection of Robert Burn's My Love is Like a Red Red Rose, Percy Blysshe Shelley's Loves Philosophy, and William Butler Yeats'
The Lake Isle of Innisfree. Yes, reading poetry is dangerous, delightful, and inspiring!
What is poetry? Poetry is the expression of humans who are born "poets" just as they are born "female" or "male". It is foreordained. They have no choice. Poetry is their writing on the tablet of life, their record emerging from the most profound or frothiest experiences of life. It is what they were put here to do. Poetry can have form, rhythm and rhyme, but that is not necessary. Poetry can be as straight forward and celebratory as Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, as carefully crafted as William Shakespeare's Sonnet XXVIII, as painful as the anonymous poet's Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Had, as hilarious as a limerick or as exciting as rap. It can be joy or perfect beauty welling out of life into written or spoken word. It can be defiance, bitterness or even the shards of a broken heart. Poetry is what it is. Poetry emerges from where it will, takes the shape that suits its inspiration, but always reveals the unique genius of its writer, the born poet.