Wounds into Words

​ WOUNDS INTO WORDS

Outside of poetry, my other passion is music. So, I particularly like poems about music.

Click over to Verse Daily to read The Cello, by Andrea Potos. I do not play the cello – I only play a little piano (and quite poorly), but that does not stop me from taking joy in hearing notes come together. Sometimes the tones alone “carve out / the hollows / the deeper /sounds / of our bones,” those places I keep hidden, even from myself. Suddenly they are brought out by a single minor chord.

They “just want to be music now.”

Writing about pain is both necessary and difficult. Pain is eased by being moved, and writing a poem about pain gets it moving.

In Andrea Potos’ poem, we don’t know what her wounds are – only that the cello is speaking to those hurting places, encouraging them to become something beautiful. We don’t know if the poet is listening to Yo-Yo Ma on Spotify, if she’s at a concert of John Rutter’s “Out of the Deep” from the Requiem, or if she plays the cello herself. We just know the cello is the vehicle for change.

What music helps heal your wounds? It could be an instrument, a song, a musical, a dirge, or a theme song from an ad, TV show, or film. Instead of writing about the wound, write about the music.

POETRY JOURNAL

• Read the poem about the cello.
• Jot down what you notice, what you like, what you don’t like, what questions you have, and at least one way in which the poem speaks to your soul.
• Read the poem again – aloud (if you didn’t the first time). Is there anything you notice this time that you want to add to your journal?
• Write your own poem about music.