Poem

meeting, of a kind

As one does, sometime in late 2021 I googled “unnamed shapes” to see who I might be sharing this name/title/idea with. Rather remarkably I came up with nothing really - except a poem. Which I read. I can conjure the sensation even now, my face, my whole body flushed suddenly with heat. How were he and I sharing these ideas, these words, these images, places and shapes? How did he know they were tethered? How did we know together? The poem, by Stephen Berg (1934-2014) was written in 1970, well before I was born, included in his book The Daughters. In sharing it recently with my lovely friend Alexis who is memorizing poems, I put it like this: “to connect with another mind creatively over decades like this feels strangely electrical and galvanizing. Like he just reached out and grabbed me and said: YES. Me too. Keep going!“

Here is the poem, note that it runs to two pages so you don’t miss the end:

Unnamed Shapes - Stephen Berg, 1970, (links to the Poetry Foundation)

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Bent grass in the back pasture and an Ardéche cave painting (Chauvet), because we’ve all been thinking about these things for a very long time.