My Life Has Been the Poem

Anita Klein

My Life Has Been the Poem

My life has been the poem I would have writ

But I could not both live and utter it.

Henry David Thoreau

Just a few words hold worlds. “My life has been the poem”.  I only came across this recently, but the idea has been with me for a long time. I’ve been chewing on the idea – poetry yes, paintings yes, music  yes, but life! Life is all these. There are many great artists working in sound and colour and sense, but then there’s every single one of us, with our lives, with each of us our circumstances our personalities, our days, our moments as  medium. Every day we take up this work, not the work we chose maybe, but the work given us, and we look for the patterns, we look for the sense.  We unravel the fraying threads and try to lay them straight. This is what we have to work with, is there beauty here, is there strength? Is there something to wrestle with,  to grapple with, something to contend with and maybe even conquer or dispel?  All I know for myself is:  the pain, the losing and the loose ends, the mundane, the exhausting, ugly,  grotesque and even the raging live alongside the beautiful, the sacred, the refreshing, the luminous and the calm. This is my work. These are what I have in hand. My life, my day, my people, my self. I was given this, and this is where I start. This is where I begin again, this moment. The greatest art is life.