I personally love reading poetry aloud to myself. Reading and re-reading; saying words over and over. Phrases that catch my attention, pausing for notes/ underlining words/ lines. You can hear me scribbling. Then I tend to read those words/ lines I’ve underlined backwards. I enjoy hearing how a poem sounds being read this way. Maybe you will too. If not, to each their own.
1.
There are so many people who’ve come before us,
arrows and wagon wheels, obsidian tools, buffalo.
Look out at the meadow, you can almost see them,
generations dissolved in the bluegrass and hay.
I want to try and be terrific. Even for an hour.
2.
If you walk long enough, your crowded head clears,
like how all the cattle run off loudly as you approach.
This fence is a good fence, but I doubt my own haywire
will hold up to all this blank sky, so open and explicit.
I’m like a fence, or a cow, or that word, yonder.
3.
There is a slow tractor traffic hollering outside,
and I’d like not to be traffic, but the window shaking.
Your shoes are piled up with mine, and the heat
comes on, makes a simple noise, a dog-yawn.
People have done this before, but not us.
-Ada Limón [Bright Dead Things]
[my underlined bits backwards as I read at the end of this recording]
People have done this before, but not us.
a simple noise, a dog-yawn.
I’m like, that word, yonder.
If you walk long enough, your crowded head clears.