The poetry pharmacy

Wow, I am loving this collection of poems assembled by William Sieghart.  I just took it out with me and was moved to tears by several of the poems.  To explain William suffered from depression himself and enduring all the usual questing and questioning that we souls go through on this journey of life most particularly as we age and inevitable losses and disappointments occur.  In the midst of that process. poetry soothed his soul and so in time he decided to post his favourite poems up in random spaces.  He then set up a space where people who were struggling could come to him with their particular issues and life woes and he would recommend one of his beloved poems.  This then morphed into the Poetry Pharmacy collection.

In the book there are chapters on subjects such as loneliness, feeling defeated, feelings of unreality and more with a page long piece of writing that contains William’s distilled wisdom of many years.  On the facing page is a poem.

To give you a sample I will include with this post one of the poems that moved me to tears and a little of William’s explanation.  I hope this touches you.

 

Condition : Stagnation

It’s easy to forget sometimes that however old we are, we still have the capacity to grow.  This poem is a reminder that it’s never too late to bud, bloom and flourish.  That winter only lasts as long as we allow it to.  Larkin expresses the wonder of that extraordinary potential for change.  It’s the feeling we recognise in the seemingly barren bush as it edges its way toward budding.  We know, intuitively and intensely, that transformation is on its way.  In a matter of weeks, that bush will be all but recognisable.  It will be fully alive again.

The Trees

Philip Larkin

The trees are coming into leaf

Like something almost being said

The recent buds relax and spread,

their greenness is a kind of grief

 

Is it that they are born again

And we grow old? No, they die too,

Their yearly trick of looking new

Is written down in rings of grain

 

Yet still the unresting castles thresh

In fullgrown thickness every May.

Last year is dead, they seem to say,

Begin afresh, afresh afresh