Poems for Las Vegas: poetry in an unsafe world
In a class I attended recently, the teacher said we all have that one thing that wakes us up to a deeper relationship with our soul. Poetry is one of those things for me. Through words, I discover my relationship to the world and try to make sense of the chaos within and around me. But sometimes, words fail.
This happened when I first heard of the Las Vegas shooting earlier this month. No words. Some pain is too deep for language. But eventually, as we begin to absorb what has happened, our words return and we use them to find healing.
My local newspaper put a call out to area poets to help find words of healing. The poems are now available in a book, Poems for Las Vegas. All book royalties will go to the National Compassion Fund, established by Clark County, Nevada, and the National Center for Victims of Crime to assist the victims and families of those affected by the mass shooting in Las Vegas.
Recently, I read that in Chinese, the written character for poem is composed of two characters. One means word and the other means temple. Together they mean poem. The wisdom of poetry is in the combination of the sacred and the word as illustrated by the character in Chinese. Read more
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