I recently organized all my digital folders and finally gathered the poems that were scattered all over the computer into one place.  When I did, it was fun to see how many poems of certain poets I had saved in my favorites file. There were a lot of them by David Whyte. This is one of my favorites because it reminds me that to be a poet, to be a writer or an artist of any kind, you must first learn to be an observer of things that other people take for granted. For many years I bemoaned my lack of productivity and pushed myself to race back and forth doing things that I thought, for sure, would open the floodgates of my writing. How silly of me. The secret was to start where I was in that moment. I have this poem pinned up on my bulletin board near where I write.

 

START CLOSE IN

Start close in,
don’t take the second step
or the third,
start with the first
thing
close in,
the step
you don’t want to take.

Start with
the ground
you know,
the pale ground
beneath your feet,
your own
way of starting
the conversation.

Read the rest of the poem here, on David’s website (left column of page)

The oh-so-talented Robyn Hood Black has the Poetry Friday roundup today–enjoy!