Reading Poetry On a Busy Day

Sometimes, when you have too much to do, you just have to walk away from it all and read a few poems.  I think the world would be a lot better place if everyone read poetry every day.  Even a little bit.

We are reading "Forty Rules of Love" by Elif Shafak in our book club.  Since it is partly about Rumi, a Sufi mystic and poet from the 12th century, I wandered from that to a book of poems by Rumi. One poem leads to another and I ended up with a few old favorites by Ted Kooser and Naomi Shihab Nye.  Really, you can't be in a bad mood after you have read poems by Kooser and Nye.

"Walk around feeling like a leaf,
know you could tumble at any second.
Then decide what you want to do with your time."

---from The Art of Disappearing by Naomi Shihab Nye
 
Rumi says "there are thousands of ways to kneel and kiss the earth."  This afternoon, my way is to read poetry and watch the sun play in the trees behind my house.

This pensive gentleman sits in a park in Vancouver.  He struck me as a symbol of waiting when I took the photo.  Maybe he was listening to his inner poet as the leaves tumbled around him on a lovely autumn day.