'Feeling experience and pressing it further'

 

“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

Poet and essayist Hirshfield, born in New York in February of 1953, is the author of 10 poetry collections, including this past year’s The Asking: New and Selected Poems.  Each has earned numerous awards as has her highly regarded book of essays about poetry, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry.   

                                            

 “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,” she said.   For Saturday’s poem here 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.