The Power of Poetry

I believe in the power of poetry. Poetry enables the poet to take the listener beyond the realm of the rational, the mundane and the informative to the world of wonder, feeling, mystery, imagination, romance and spirituality.

The other day I was taking a leisurely walk in a park in our neighborhood when I suddenly remembered two poems that I used to enjoy very much during my school years. Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star is one of them. The other is William Wordsworth’s Golden Daffodils.

“I wandered lonely as a cloud that floats on high o’er vales and hills, when all at once I saw a crowd, a host of golden daffodils beside the lake, beneath the trees.”

“Oft, when on my couch I lie, in vacant or pensive mood, they flash upon that inward eye which is the bliss of solitude; and then my heart with pleasure fills and dances with the daffodils.”

As I was reflecting on these poems, I was also lost in the enjoyment of the sights of a rainbow in the Eastern sky and the setting Sun in the West. The grandeur I experienced that evening convinced me that there are many things science can never explain. For instance, the beauty of the rainbow to the human eye, the wonder of the little boy that sang Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and the mysticism of Wordsworth that his daffodils inspired. And so I thought that there must be a design element built into the evolution of life on earth after all, even as it appears pointless as some scientists suggest, given its bewildering features of opposites like yin and yang, beauty and filth, pain and pleasure, predator and prey, peace and turmoil as its essential building blocks.

And I ended up writing the following lines.

THE DESIGNER AT TWILIGHT

The Sun in the Western Sky wondered why Nature lets humans on its secrets to spy as it exited from the horizon’s edge seeking new ways with Nature to merge.

Water molecules assembled in the Eastern Sky and formed rainbows with just the visible colors seen in the byplay, the rest being denied to the human eye as if decreed by the Designer’s sigh.

In the twilight of the Sun’s parting strive, in his favorite park on Homestead Drive, a lone witness roamed as a student of Zen with occasional stops every now and then, to marvel at bird formations way up in the sky.

As the genes in the region’s flora and fauna contributed their own might to the drama of it all, the lone witness reasoned if man might one day roam around atomic nuclei and share the thrill of the electrons in the light bulbs of halogen in the park lights that just started to brighten.

Up from the Upward Sky, the rising Crescent wondered why.

Certainly, the power of poetry is unique in literature especially when it comes to conveying our feelings of wonder and imagination. This I believe.