Noticing More Beauty

I have thought to write this over the years, but I have always chickened out. Today I will say it. I read a repeat of a heartbreaking headline yesterday: "Baby Suffocates in Hot Car." I can never read the articles; they are too awful. And I always feel horribly sick to my stomach. And I can't read them because after the article usually come the comments. The comments where perfect strangers to the people involved berate them publicly for being the worst of parents, neglectful monsters, and worthy of death or worse. I assume because you are all my friends that you have never (nor would) post any such thing in such an instance, but be honest, have you ever thought those things?! I'm here to tell you (and risk losing friends in the process) that if you've ever thought (or said) those things, you need to say them to me. No, I've never lost a child to suffocation in a hot car, but... I could have.  I could be the one being called those terrible names. When ou...

...after a conversation with my mother who taught me to appreciate it: When I taught the poetry class last fall, the curriculum described poetry, in part, as "compressed thought." And so it is. Good poetry, at least, prevents you from saying "getting rid of things" to propel you to a better word such as "eradicate." And then it challenges you to use it in conjunction with other works like "enumerate" or "predicate." All the while, demanding further restraints of dactyl or pentameter. It would seem, at first glance, that the number of literary requirements upon good poetry would make it almost impossible to achieve something noteworthy, and yet there are hundreds (thousands) of poems that exquisitely capture the emotions of universal moments better than entire volumes often do. Poetry expresses only what must be said about a topic and does it more eloquently. The constraints improve the product. And such is life - or can be... ...