THE POWER OF POETRY

I’ve been feeling a little blue lately, not quite perky enough to write on THE HOPE LADY Blog. Today I decided to see what would happen if I wrote a poem of complaints. Here goes.

It’s hard to be hopeful in winter
When the wind is cold
And the snow is falling
And the ground is slippery
And you’ve never cared much for winter.

It’s hard to be hopeful when pain strikes
At a time when you just didn’t need it
And you find yourself taking medicine
And sitting since it hurts to stand
When you want to be making shortbread.

It’s hard to have hope when you’re angry
At all the machines in your life
That just aren’t working properly
Taking more from you than they’re giving
But you don’t want to live without them.

It wasn’t my idea to write a poem of complaints. The idea came from Yi Li at yesterday’s staff meeting. Yi Li is a hope scholar whose poetry is so good that one of her poems took a prize in a contest for poetry by new Canadians. She set out to write a letter to her landlord, detailing a list of complaints about the lack of maintenance at here place. But instead of writing your average complaint letter, she wrote a poem about the problems and sent it off to the landlord. She says that as the poem progressed, she began to feel more and more happy, a wondrous thing for a person so utterly annoyed about the intrusion of mice and the lack of refrigerator repair. Not only did it make her feel better, but the poem also got some pleasing results. Her landlord offered to let her break the lease without penalty.

Even on the coldest days, with your painkillers and your laptop giving you grief, it’s hard—maybe impossible--not to be hopeful when you go to the office and find Yi Li there!!!