Motherhood poetry, week 10
with Naomi Shihab Nye’s “Kindness”
Over at Poetry for Life, our hero’s poetry journey takes a kindly turn — a turn toward kindness despite this world being so often unkind.
I’ve written about the Dursleys of the Harry Potter universe before. I’ve found them to be a great way to explore people who do things that are hurtful without meaning to. They aren’t evil, just “bent,” as C.S. Lewis would say.
My poem about kindness is drawn from that post about the Dursleys, and it’s an erasure poem. That means I printed my article and blacked out/erased everything that was not the poem I wanted revealed. Think of an erasure poem as the equivalent of a sculptor setting free the art trapped within the marble. The odd spacing reflects where these words appear in the actual post.
D0 yourself a favor: for your Dursleys, erase everything that is not a poem. See what beauty is trapped within those words.