i floated in those words

I found it dwelling in the response I received when I needed someone to assure me that my poetry would be an acceptable gift to give someone:

“But what can you do with poetry? Maybe if you write it on something useful…”

There it was. The uninvestigated truth that poetry is too impractical, too tossed aside, too improperly separated from the practicality of life and even from other forms of art.

But poetry is so valuable within itself.

You can know poetry like you know your daily breakfast, the familiar taste of soggy cheerios as you read the morning paper while still shaking off the sensation of nesting inside darkness and sleep.

You can walk through poetry like a walk through the woods on a sunny day with endless questions breathing in the branches and strips of sun painting strokes across your skin that disappear as you move.

You can feel poetry like a child feels a summer afternoon, hearing inaudible delight in a lazy day without having yet discovered what work is, without finding any need for concern with overbearing details of life.

Poetry houses something. It’s something you might find elsewhere like in a circumstance that naturally offers accidental sweetness, or in a perfectly taken photo, or in a just-rightly created piece of art, or resounding from the voice of a favorite person, or within the frame of an ideal moment.

It resides in poetry to alert you that life and everything in it has the perfect potential to be right and unspoken silences might be said.

for a moment, all bells ring true.