Found Poem

Yes, I know I said I’d post my purple “not quite as creepy as the story poem” but I’ve decided it’s a work in progress so you’re just going to have to wait until I finish playing around with it.

In the meantime, I found a Found Poem that I wrote a few years ago. A Found Poem is pretty much what it sounds like – a poem that’s “found” in other writings. It’s created by taking words, sentences, or whole sections from prose sources and making changes in spacing lines, turning them into a poem.

My poem was “found” in the introduction of a psychology textbook called Women Who Run With the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Ph.D. It’s a really fascinating book, and I’m not normally a fan of non-fiction. Anyway, this is the poem that spoke to me from those words:

The Wild Woman

We may have forgotten her names,
we may not answer when she calls ours,
but in our bones we know her,
we yearn toward her;
we know she belongs to us and we to her.

A sense of her comes through vision;
through sights of great beauty.
I have felt her when I see
what we call in the woodlands
a Jesus-God sunset.
I have felt her move in me
from seeing the fishermen
come up from the lake at dusk
with lanterns lit,
and also from seeing my newborn baby’s toes
all lined up like a row of sweet corn.
We see her where we see her,
which is everywhere.

She comes to us through sound as well;
through music which vibrates the sternum,
excites the heart;
it comes through the drum,
the whistle, the call, and the cry.
It comes through the written and the spoken word;
sometimes a word, a sentence or a poem or a story,
is so resonant, so right,
it causes us to remember,
at least for an instant,
what substance we are really made from,
and where is our true home.

The longing for her comes
when one happens across someone
who has secured this wildish relationship.
The longing comes
when one realizes one has given scant time
to the mystic cookfire
or to the dreamtime,
too little time to one’s own creative life,
one’s life work or one’s true loves.

We eventually must pursue the wildish nature.
Then we leap into that forest
or into the desert
or into the snow
and run hard,
our eyes scanning the ground,
our hearing sharply tuned,
searching under,
searching over,
searching for a clue,
a remnant,
a sign that she still lives,
that we have not lost our chance.

The Wild Woman has no name,
for she is so vast.