By Sarah Webb
Poetry was one of my first practices, and at times my only practice. Turning to other kinds of writing, I nearly lost the poetry entirely, but have returned to it in the last several years, and found it helpful and puzzling.
There is a mystery to poetry. Where do the poems come from? Writing a poem involves an opening, a receiving. I do not write the poem-it comes, sometimes in words, sometimes in something I match words to. Because the poem so clearly does not come from me, one of my earliest questions was, "Who writes the poem?" Now as I sit looking into the question, "Who am I?" I begin to see that poems are not so different from everything else: Who hears the bird? Who thinks the thought?
Who writes the poem? I do not know. I used to envision some magic being, some higher self. The poems are wiser than I am and more beautiful; sometimes I do not even understand them. But they tell my life-my loves and joys and horror and separation. I think of Ramana Maharshi's description of the person in contact with the divine: an iron bar heated white hot. Is its glow its own light or the light from the heating fire?
There have been periods when to sit on the cushion was to be flooded with poems. I tried cutting through them, writing them down, promising to write them immediately after sitting, going into their source. When I went into the source of the poem, I found excitement, a gladness. At times it was like sitting in bubbles, a carbonated fountain, with bright energy bursting up into form. It is hard to stay in that energy because it keeps buoying up into words; it wants to sing.
That gladness moves into love. So many poems, written close to sitting or not, contain the words, "I love you," and often the words "I love you" come alone. The poet William Stafford says he writes because of the mental states poetry takes him through. I find those mental states to move into acceptance or love. The poems may begin in pain or questioning, but they usually progress to a resolution which is calm and joyful; sometimes they do not. Over time a series of my poems softened an attitude of horror I had towards a former relationship so that the love could become evident again. They were healing poems, and perhaps significantly, they were the poems that came most insistently in sitting.
I do not know why a poem comes. There is a sense of something pushing up into form, as grass pushes up. Perhaps like the iron bar, the mind is radiating.
Editor's Note: Sarah Webb lives in Chickasaw, Oklahoma, and has been practicing with the Montreal Zen Center for many years. She has attended many sesshins at the MKZC. This article originally appeared in Zen Bowl (Rochester Zen Center).