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.

A Dirge

Anita Klein, "Betty and the Bird"

A Dirge

Related Poem Content Details

Why were you born when the snow was falling? 

You should have come to the cuckoo’s calling, 

Or when grapes are green in the cluster, 

Or, at least, when lithe swallows muster 

For their far off flying 

From summer dying. 

Why did you die when the lambs were cropping? 

You should have died at the apples’ dropping, 

When the grasshopper comes to trouble, 

And the wheat-fields are sodden stubble, 

And all winds go sighing 

For sweet things dying. 

Christina Rossetti

    I need a good cry once in a while. Happy poems don't mean a thing without a sprinkling of sadness and grief. It's like salt. In this poem the question "why?" of someone who cannot answer, the irony of birth happening in Winter and death in Spring and the string of beautiful images - snowfall, grapes growing on a vine, Swallows flying, altogether make a poignant statement of contradiction and loss - life in death and death in life - it's beautiful and sad, and it's how I feel about life overall. It's the mix of tears and laughter that lies at the heart of everything.