Dorianne Laux

The story of the Poem Box: I had the good fortune to take a workshop with Dorianne Laux at Poetry @Round Top in Texas. She shared about how she put a box of poetry at the end of her driveway where she shared poems, hers and others. In 2017 I finally put a poem box at the end of my driveway (thank you Tony Hayden, woodworker). So every year around the anniversary I put one of Dorianne’s poems in to honor her inspiration for all of this. I am so glad to share poetry with all of you. I love what poems can do. How they lift us, carry us, remind us of what truly is important.

Now we turn towards our 6th year. Grateful for poets, their poems and how it keeps us in connection.

If This Is Paradise

The true mystery of the world is the visible…

— Oscar Wilde

If this is paradise:  trees, beehives,

boulders. And this: bald moon, shooting

stars, a little sun.  If in your hands

this is paradise: sensate flesh

hidden bone, your own eyes

opening, then why should we speak?

Why not lift into each day like the animals

that we are and go silently

about our true business: the hunt

for water, fat berries, the mushroom’s

pale meat, tumble through waist-high grasses

without reason, find shade and rest there,

our limbs spread beneath the meaningless sky,

find the scent of the lover

and mate wildly. If this is paradise

and all we have to do is be born and live

and die, why pick up the stick at all?

Why see the wheel in the rock?

Why bring back from the burning fields

a bowl full of fire and pretend that it’s magic

— Dorianne Laux