Find poetry

Poems come not just from poets. You showed me that. Poems will be found if you choose to look in the twists and turns of forest paths and the hard sharp edges of the very smallest of stones. You will find verse and rhyme and melody in the flick and bend of limbs: race and run and dance, you said, and you will make light and heat and sound. You will find beauty in the rivers and the trees, and if you listen you can hear song in the atoms of our bodies; singing too in the earth and sea and sun. Listen, you said, to what life is made of.

You wrote large how things are made; said: ask big questions, and keep asking and do not be satisfied with the ‘this is how it is’ and ‘no one knows’. Be free, my lovely girl, in your imaginings, and above all be interested; above all live deep. Above everything be generous with yourself, your love, your time. Give what you know and listen and learn and think: always think. Be wrong; be right; be happy.

It is because of you that I hear the world so brightly; that I feel its goodness. It is because of you that I expect so much of life.

Yes. I expect so much of you, we said. And in that expectation, sometimes we did not understand. But our sameness is bright in front of me. I am made of you and I take this time to say; even when I’m not as kind as I could be or when I misunderstand, thank you for what you have given me, my father, my friend, thank you for who I am.