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Poetry Seeks the Unknown
I never met my mother.
Like many people adopted as infants in the the 20th century, the fact of my adoption was kept secret — from me, from the neighbors, from my teachers. When I was in my 30’s, I found my blood family, but my mother had already passed away.
Poetry is a map of the human heart, a useful tool if you don’t know where a heart came from, what it’s made of, or where it’s going. I map my mother’s heart in my imagination, looking for what she felt about me.
If we’d met, there’s no telling how our relationship may have been inscribed by my feelings of abandonment, or her feelings of loss. The poem below, originally published in Crab Creek Review (Contest open now — regular submissions open from September 15 through November 15!), is my attempt to imagine this unknown.
Poetry begins with reaching for the unseen. Then comes the asking of questions. Then, being open to unexpected answers.
The quote below is taken from a speculative novel, but “to really ask” seems very much like a definition of a real live poet to me.
“Very few beings really seek knowledge in this world. . . they try to wring from the unknown the answers they have already shaped in their own minds — justifications, confirmations, forms of consolation without which they can’t go on. To really ask is to open the door to the whirlwind. The answer may annihilate the question and the questioner.”
― Anne Rice, The Vampire Lestat
Welcome the whirlwind.
