Frenemies, Part V

I used to hate poetry universally, but over the years I’ve *slowly* come to *occasionally* appreciate the way poets are able to articulate ideas and emotions I’m dispossessed of words to properly express. From time to time I’ll be grabbing coffee with a friend—trying to piece together a word of encouragement, or struggling to properly explain my hot mess of a life, or failing to put words to gratitude or hope or pain—and a snippet of a poem will come to mind, an epiphany, a perfect encapsulation of empathy I could never achieve on my own. I’m stopped dead in my tracks at the significance of pronounced emotion, and I’m grateful for the staggering power of the written word.

Today I’m feelin Bach, Winter by Jane Mead, and want to celebrate it here.

You can read more about my reluctant friendship with poetry here, and you can see more poems I love to not hate here.

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Bach must have known how--
something flutters away when you turn
to face the face you caught sideways
in a mirror in a hall at dusk--

and how the smell of apples in a bowl
can stop the heart for an instant,
between sink and stove
in the dead of winter when stars

of ice have spread across the windows
and everything is perfectly still
until you catch the sound of something
lost and shy beating its wings.

And then: music. 

—Jane Mead