The Poet's Obligation
For no apparent reason the following stanza from a Pablo Neruda poem popped up at me the other day.

To whoever is not listening to the sea
this Friday morning, to whoever is cooped up
in house or office, factory or woman
or street or mine or harsh prison cell:
to him I come, and, without speaking or looking,
I arrive and open the door of his prison,
and a vibration starts up, vague and insistent,
a great fragment of thunder sets in motion
the rumble of the planet and the foam,
the raucous rivers of the ocean flood,
the star vibrates swiftly in its corona,
and the sea is beating, dying and continuing.

The poet's obligation- the writer's obligation- is to open prison doors that we may find ourselves in. It is what writer's do- tell the truth from their perspective that allows us all to wake up, see what may very well be happening.

Poets do it in such powerful ways because they work so carefully at crafting words into unique kinds of sentences. Their sentences have a special rhythm that is difficult in prose. As such we have to pay attention. We have to allow ourselves to be caught up in the words and their flow. You can't skim poetry like you can prose. You miss so much.

I wish I could be more of a poet. I use words in prose more easily than poetry. But I am grateful- and humbled- to be able to do some small portion of what poets and writers are called to do.

Neruda continues:

So, drawn on by my destiny,
I ceaselessly must listen to and keep
the sea's lamenting in my awareness,
I must feel the crash of the hard water
and gather it up in a perpetual cup
so that, wherever those in prison may be,
wherever they suffer the autumn's castigation,
I may be there with an errant wave,
I may move, passing through windows,
and hearing me, eyes will glance upward
saying "How can I reach the sea?"
And I shall broadcast, saying nothing,
the starry echoes of the wave,
a breaking up of foam and of quicksand,
a rustling of salt withdrawing,
the grey cry of sea-birds on the coast.

So, through me, freedom and the sea
will make their answer to the shuttered heart.
--Link