The Religion of Poetry

I always loved Dylan Thomas' poem Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night. There's
something about the rhythm, the insistence, the power of pain and endurance expressed.

Embarrassingly enough, I first learned about the poem in Rodney Dangerfield's Back to School, a film I watched countless times on long sick days in middle school. Sad that it took trashy boob comedy and an absence from school to introduce me to great poetry. I remember crying as he recited the poem proudly at the end of the film.

Years later I sat on the corner of Chicago Avenue, drunk with my friend Anika. She begged me to read the poem and after a long performance of bashfulness, I obliged. I read it to her because of her rigorous passion for life. Together we screamed it out loud and cried. I think it rained that night. Hot raindrops plopped on my hairy legs.

For me, poetry is like a religion. Rereading lines like hymns, I feel close to the dead, to the earth, to our commonalities and our few differences. In poetry, I feel humanity's struggle for possibility, love, and joy in a world gone terribly out of balance. The glimmers of liberation shimmering in the hearts of all feed us during awful times and help us continue to move forward.

Poetry can liberate our souls from quotidian drudgery and compel us to act from a place of joy and possibility. Why do we spend so much time listening to the calculated cruelty of corporate news hacks and so little exalting the creativity of each other in our daily lives? One poem speaks a thousand times more truth than an entire year of journalism. For this, we should worship great poets.