If I Write Before I Wake

Joel B. Levine MD

I know a poet. I watched her interact with the world and draw words from thoughts so deep that they came only in dreams. Words then become evocations and reading them becomes visceral. Unlike prose, the poet is not telling a story. The poem is its own mystery, an unexpected line of identity drawn from the outside in. It is more than magic, for a trick is essentially what you do not see. A great poem is all about seeing again what has been lost to sight. Memories of life, feelings from having been alive, are as much part of the perpetual as we are of the temporary.

To write poetry, therefore, obliges a leaving the known world. Poets often wake from sleep, I am told, and furiously write before they have fully returned.. They are coming back from an origin, from a place where all that means something, resides. Real time is inexorably forward but, for the poet, the thought comes like what are seeing now when we look at the sky, an image so old that it has taken eons to finally be made visible.

She has just been selected for the Hugh MacLennan Poetry Series, a most prestigious acceptance especially for a first collection. She has written about her place and the people of her childhood. Hardly an esoteric topic , often fractionally recalled but never truly relived. It is yet the most deeply true and retained in a place that is transcendent, the place that only mystics or spiritual masters see and express in psalm or parable. As you read her words, they beseech what you have long lost, awaking them but only to make them dissolve into a profound sense of reliving.

The human mind is beyond wonder. We skate on the slick surface fully unaware of how thick the ice. Below, is our actual source , primordial and germinating to the few things that are eternal. In every world, inanimate or suffused, all things have connection. If the bee did not pollinate, we would not have food. If those we have loved are not returned to us, even in just one lyrical line, we might forget why we give love to others.

We are , as was said, “ rounded with a sleep” but only what is organic disappears. The true poet shows us that the power of a love, even in the ether, cannot be denied. In our time, we are fooled , believing that our feelings are easily born and fleeting. The great poet is not. They just make the decision to give up the safety of the shore and enter that sea.

What it must take to go to that place. It is an act of will far beyond intellect or ego. It is a desire to know. Know the eternal things, see them as veins of “forever”, to mine them, often in sleep , and bring them to the surface.