.
A man told me once that all the bad people
were needed. Maybe not all, but your fingernails
you need; they are really claws, and we know
claws. The sharks - what about them?
They make other fish swim faster. The hard-faced men
in black coats who chase you for hours
in dreams - that's the only way to get you
to the shore. Sometimes those hard women
who abandon you get you to say, "You."
A lazy part of us is like a tumbleweed.
It doesn't move on its own. Sometimes it takes
a lot of Depression to get tumbleweeds moving.
Then they blow across three or four States.
This man told me that things work together.
Bad handwriting sometimes leads to new ideas;
and a careless god - who refuses to let people
eat from the Tree of Knowledge - can lead
to books, and eventually to us. We write
poems with lies in them, but they help a little.
.
~ Robert Bly
Morning Poems
thanks to whiskey river
.
