Ode to A Poetic Gathering

I am an avid lover of the arts. I wrote this piece when I visited a poetry event recently. I'm sure some of you can relate.

Every time I visit The Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts, it feels like coming home. There's a delicious divinity about a group of arts-centred minds and bodies gathered in one creative space. Like the push and pull of the moon on waves and tides, it moves me.

Yesterday I sat in a semi-circle of poets expressing livity: dissecting different aspects of their lives with surgical precision, using words like scalpels to make incisions with similes, metaphors, onomatopoeia ... .

I marvelled again at my love for prose. My illicit affair with words: written, spoken, sung, mimed and danced. Words on a page, words floating in space, a word settled so comfortably on a tongue, caressed by an accent and expelled on hot air ...

Poetry. Prose. Drama. Literature. Language. Linguistics.

I love it. I love the dichotomy of sounds, the variations of rhythms, the pleasure of a word riding the wave a lilting voice ... . A thought given life through the process of articulation, breathed like magic into a space that it occupies until it vaporises. Or evaporates.

I love it. I love the potency and cogency of words. I like that the Bible says, \"In the beginning was the word ...\". It gives me an excuse. Because when people speak, or write really well, I see God. And I worship at that altar.

So yesterday, when I visited the poetry society's monthly meeting, I had an experience with the divine Word. Word.