“Beautifully crafted words have the power to captivate the mind of anybody.” – Sam Veda
There are poems, quotes, collections of words that haunt me. I read them once and they take up residence in my head, echoing through at the strangest times. I’ll simply be walking along a street and a specific line or phrase will come to me, repeating itself until I have to whisper it aloud or stop a moment and think it clearly.
This is one of those poems. I have shared it before on my old blog, but it wanted to be shared again. I hope that whoever it is who needs to hear it comes for a visit.
When she walks into the room,
everybody turns:
Some kind of light is coming from her head.
Even the geraniums look curious…
We’re all attracted to the perfume
of fermenting joy,
We’ve all tried to start a fire,
and one day maybe it will blaze up on its own.
In the meantime, she is the one today among us
most able to bear the idea of her own beauty,
and when we see it, what we do is natural:
we take our burned hands
out of our pockets,
and clap.
-Tony Hoagland, from ‘Grammar’
