THE QUINTESSENTIAL MUSE
Poetry is the muse that has captured the mind, heart and imagination of humanity from the beginning of time. She travels from the realm of formlessness, upon vehicles of thoughts, feelings and emotion, making her way from our hearts and heads through our hands and onto paper. Though screens are not her favorite, she manages always to be in step with the times.
Poetic justice is an expression indicating that virtue is rewarded in a manner that is either peculiar or ironic. Poetic license indicates the freedom to depart from rules and convention. Poetry is a free-roaming virtuous rebel inherently liberated from restriction. She grants voice to the voiceless and words to the ineffable. She lives everywhere humans do and everywhere they don’t.
She is expressed in nature, in song and in dance. She is in service to the broad spectrum of human emotion from anguish to ecstacy. She is present at both birth and at death. Her presence can be felt equally at sunrise and sunset. She is there when things are going well and there when we are hanging by a thread.
She cares not whether our words are ugly and bitter or bright and buoyant - she is a faithful and unbiased servant whose aim is to help us express. We see her in the point of a ballerina’s toe, in the arch of a loved one’s back while we make love. We see her in the shape of someone’s lips , or the curvature of a cheekbone. We taste her in the salt of our tears.
We hear her by the babbling brook and at the river’s edge. She is the smell of earth after a recent rain, the feeling of release after a long refrain. She is the song of the birds and the howl of the wind. She is the steady flame of a candle and a fire in a fireplace on a cold winter’s night.
She is the scent of your favorite flower, the taste of your favorite food. She is the one who kisses your hands when you finally lay your burdens down. She is a shaman, an alchemist, a magician and a shapeshifter. She is at once the vehicle of expression and the very thing being expressed.
She is everything. She is the experience and the one experiencing. She is the writer and the written. She is the ineffable and the apparent. She is silence and sound, formless and form, unbound by confines of time. She is modern, she is youthful , she is nowhere. She is ancient , she is old, she is omnipresent. She’s a haiku, a koan, a sonnet and a rhyme, you can find her everywhere if you simply take the time.