Advice to My Students : Poem In Your Post

Advice to My Students:  How to Write a Poem

Forget, now, for a moment
that you were the blond boy
whose father jumped off the bridge
when you were only eleven.  Forget
that you are the brokenhearted,
the cuckolded, the windswept lover
alone beneath the dangling pines.
Forget that you are the girl
of the godless cry, that no one
took you into his arms
during the cold night, that you have cried
from the fathomless depths
like a blue whale, and the world
has called back to you only its oracles
of relinquishment and moonlight.
Forget, now, my young friends,
everything you can never forget,
and hear, in the untamed wind,

in the perorations of the ravishing air,
the words for your life: omelette,
divestiture, Prokofiev, stars.
Forget, even as you gaze up at them,
the astral bodies and the heavenly bodies,
forget, even, your own ravenous body
and call out, into the beckoning light,
the names of everything you have
never known: flesh and blood, stone
and interlude, marmalade and owl -
those first syllables of your new world:
your clear and forgotten life.

                               - Michael Blumenthal

Welcome back into the world of school, the school of life, young friends. 

Let's write. 

MFB,
L