I have a love/hate relationship with poetry – certainly with poetry that takes itself far too seriously, extending the notion that poets are a fragile, sensitive, breakable lot, rather than people who paint and puzzle with words, stretch their meaning, invoke in readers mental pictures without benefit of long, descriptive passages in prose – I prefer to think of us as a playful bunch, and cut my teeth on “Shelly Silverstein” and Hillaire Belloc and anonymous writers of nonsense and limericks. Here, for example, is the first poem I ever memorized as a child.
There is a thread called “Write a short poem” on SparkPeople in a Team called Tips for Writing and Weight Loss, One woman wrote about lovers trying to change one another until they basically became each other. I couldn’t help but think of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116, and the line “Love is not love which bends with the remover to remove.” I set out to write a slightly different poem about change, with a nod to the Bard and the romantic tradition of poetry that descended from his work – and a wink to his Sonnet 130 (which is really more my style). I was too lazy to make it rhyme, or to give it a whole 14 lines. Let’s not pretend it’s blank verse; it’s just a half-assed, wannabe sonnet that didn’t quite achieve full glory because its author – who famously refuses to write Romance – got tired of it and moved on:
Change is the Only Constant
Change is the only constant understood
By fickle, jaded hearts that languish, bored –
That discontented by contentment fly
To seek the skyward rush, heart-stopping pause,
That Death-defiant, rollercoaster plunge
A fall from grace, for sure – but what a fall!
O, Love! Destroy, then resurrect us all.— Holly Jahangiri
All the times I look “dreamy eyed, romantic” in photos are attributable to weird things – like painkillers. Or the fear that neighbors bearing fireworks are going to burn down my house… Seriously, the “featured image” above is not as melancholic or romantic as it may appear – I’m just trying to figure out whether to go to bed or pull out the garden hose and use it on my neighbors.