A new look -- Saturday's Poem

“One reason to write a poem is to flush from the deep thickets of the self some thought, feeling, comprehension, question, music, you didn't know was in you, or in the world.” Jane Hirshfield

Hirshfield's seven books of poetry have each received numerous awards. Her fifth book, Given Sugar, Given Salt, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and her sixth, After, was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and named a “best book of 2006” by The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, and the Financial Times. 

She also authored the highly regarded book of essays about poetry, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry.                                               

 Fellow poet and critic David Barker described Hirshfield as "one of our finest, most memorable contemporary poets." Hirshfield herself said simply, “My job as a human being as well as a writer is to feel as thoroughly as possible the experience that I am part of, and then press it a little further.”   Here, for Saturday’s poem is Hirshfield’s,

Changing Everything

I was walking again
in the woods,
a yellow light
was sifting all I saw.

Willfully,
with a cold heart,
I took a stick,
lifted it to the opposite side
of the path.

There, I said to myself,
that's done now.
Brushing one hand against the other,
to clean them
of the tiny fragments of bark.

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