Stuart Kestenbaum

Stuart Kestenbaum (1953 - ) is a poet and former director of the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts. He has been a visiting writer at art programs including Penland, the Cranbrook Academy of Art and Rhode Island School of Design. His most recent book is How to Start Over. Kestenbaum is Maine’s Poet Laureate. He has written and spoken widely on craft making and creativity.

Prayer

Our problem — may I include you? — is that we

don't know how to start, how to just close

our eyes and let something dance between

our hearts and our lips. We don't know how 

to skip across the room only for the joy of the leap.

We walk, we run, but what happened to the skip

and it's partner, the gallop, the useless and imaginary

way we could move through space, the horses we

rode before we knew how to saddle up, before we

had opinions about everything and just loved

the wind in our faces and horizon in our eyes.

— Stuart Kestenbaum