From my friend Jim LaVilla-Havelin
SLAM THE TOWN!!! National Poetry Month in San Antonio 2012 - March 10-May 13,2012
Wherever you are, on April 1 (and because April 1 is a Sunday, April 2, as well): Use this sheet to type, hand-write, print – a poem you like (your own, someone else’s, famous, unknown). Make copies and get them out to everyone you know, and folks you don’t know, too.
Under windshield wipers, in work mailboxes, at restaurants, on chairs, on buses, to your email list. SLAM THE TOWN with poems, poems as gifts, poems as a way of letting everyone know how important poetry is in all of our lives. (If you use a poem that is copyrighted, in a book, please note where the poem can be found, cite the source.)
Hold Everything Dear
as the brick of the afternoon stores the rose heat of the journey
as the rose buds a green room to breathe
and blossoms like the wind
as the thinning birches whisper their silver stories of the wind to the urgent
in the trucks
as the leaves of the hedge store the light
that the moment thought it had lost
as the nest of her wrist beats like the chest of a wren in the morning air
as the chorus of the earth find their eyes in the sky
and unwrap them to each other in the teeming dark
hold everything dear
the calligraphy of birds across the morning
the million hands of the axe, the soft hand of the earth
one step ahead of time
the broken teeth of tribes and their long place
steppe-scattered and together
clay’s small, surviving handle, the near ghost of a jug
carrying itself towards us through the soil
the pledge of offered arms, the single sheet that is our common walking
the map of the palm held
in a knot
but given as a torch
hold everything dear
the paths they make towards us and how far we open towards them
the justice of a grass than unravels palaces but shelters the songs of the searching
the vessel that names the waves, the jug of this life, as it fills with the days
as it sinks to become what it loves
memory that grows into a shape the tree always knew as a seed
the words
the bread
the child who reaches for the truths beyond the door
the yearning to begin again together
animals keen inside the parliament of the world
the people in the room the people in the street the people
hold everything dear
–Gareth Evans
I found the poem on this wonderful art blog by painter Deborah Barlow, http://slowmuse.wordpress.com/. She (and many others) have picked it up from painter, essayist, political activist, writer and Marxist John Berger's book of the same title. (The poem was written for Mr. Berger and before you slink away from the term Marxist, read his comments in Orion magazine here.)
I have not been able to exactly trace Mr. Evans, but he might also be a producer. Anyone who knows if there are more poems of his out there, let me know, as I would like to read them!
