"The road will only be wide. The rain will never stop falling"
-Naomi Shihab Nye, "Shoulders"

I'm pleased with the results of this past week. As someone fascinated with linguistics, it stands to reason that words would spur me on to create work in which I can take pride. This week was also light on schoolwork, so I felt like I had the time to breathe and sit down and really think over my poetry.

That said, the next week is set to be pretty stressful. I don't think it will be useful to push myself to write something new every day, and I probably won't get much enjoyment out of it. Instead, I'm picking one project to do for the entire week, to return to and to polish and polish again: I'm going to write a poem about my dog. 

Something that I've thought and rethought over the years is whether the subject of a poem matters. Does the relevancy of the material affect the poem's impact? One can relate to one poem more than one can another, always. But could a cat lover read a poem about a dog and be moved? When I read Neruda's "A Dog Has Died," I nearly cried. I am inclined to believe it's because of his way with words, his "my hairy dog was jumping about with all the voltage of the sea's movement." 

Another poem which actually made me sob at 3 AM--things I do with my free time--was "Those Winter Sundays" by Robert Hayden. It impacted me because I thought of my own parents, of course, but why? Because it provoked empathy like I'd never felt before. 

So yes, good poetry makes you sit up and listen to a story that might otherwise bypass your ears like background noise. Not to be too ambitious, but that's my aim for this week. I'm going to write a poem about my dog that would make a cat lover smile at a puppy.