Poetry is a great love of mine. I’ve maintained a literary-poetics website for years. But, I’m aware poetry isn’t everyone’s cuppa. “Just give it to me straight” some might say. “No more u’ them goofy met-what-fers and twisted talk.”

Our complex, gloriously chaotic cosmos has rarely been straight forward. Nothing is really as it seems. What we see isn’t just what we see but a thousand other things unseen, unimagined, unrealized, unforgotten, and undertaken. The thing is never just the thing. Every thing houses, pictures, reflects, spawns other things beyond itself. Look at a sandwich from directly above and one sees a slice of bread. Take a slow look downward and to the side and the rest of the picture comes into delicious, three-dimensional view. What starts as rather dull becomes kaleidoscopic in the searching. One thing becomes many new, and colourful things.

If clear, simple, logical, non-symbolic language is what you’re after, avoid the Bible. Close to a third of its contents is versified in some fashion, poetry and allegory and metaphor. A great deal of it is narrative, eternal truths and values conveyed by means of story.

I conclude with a poem I composed a couple years ago that was recently highlighted on one of my favourite websites. It plays with the idea of more from less as described above. Thanks for being here with me and, until then, may the Advent spirit of expectation and preparedness capture you.

Advent

Cup before the pour, cocoa, or tea.

Clouds, rain-swollen, before taking their moment.

Hearts before words, warm and rightly spoken.

Page before pen, story pushing out to meet its maker.

Inside, a child gazes out at virgin snow.

Child, new and eyes closed, before the first embrace.

Car, keys jangling in shaky hands, before first welcome.

Night, old and disheveled, before day-gates open.

Gravitas, bodies’ ache, release of first touch.

Eyes, leaden-lidded, before the thick of sleep.

Tired world, sore of woe, looks East.