Prologue: This began with a dream: I am teaching a class in a sunken atrium-like classroom. On the way to class I think that I will assign a research project: what is the most important book ever written? When I get there, however, I assign a group research project: what is most important in life? The class breaks into two groups: one says water, and the other says wisdom.
It was clear to me that I should invite Lady Wisdom to speak.
I.
I’ve known you.
I’ve watched you consume a library
book by book, as if it were
a pound of chocolates to savor all alone,
licking each melted passage
off the roof of your mind.
You danced with each new idea
until its shoes wore out and it clanged
back onto its flat metal home.
New partners always awaited
your curtsy and admiration
for a well-argued waltz, a syllogistic samba,
a polka for persuasion, a non-fallacious foxtrot,
or even the a priori bunny hop hop
hop on to the next one.
Knowledge is power, you thought,
over what you never were sure.
Real power, you found out, was
not getting what you wanted
but getting what you wanted
that you had not known you wanted.
And there you saw me:
The step beyond.
The perspective of wait.
II.
I am the pattern seer,
staring at disparity until I see its sameness,
like your forehead’s wide span of skin
curling in a wrinkle, given time.
Love has a billion forms, each one unique,
as does hate and courage and fear
and all things human, but I see
chords and echoes everywhere
in the meter of beating hearts.
Listen to the lives of uncountable souls,
all taking one breath, then another and another
and hear the rhyme of living:
people are a boundless poem–
neither sonnet nor sestina–pulsing meaning
in the rhythm with the kindling stroke of love.
In images of un-love even, the daily news,
love throbs on, made loud and louder by its absence,
the volta between octave and sestet,
the midline’s caesura, the stanza break,
the punctuation in the verse of being human,
created by a poet God.
III.
I speak this poem by heart.
It is the way to the gem in the lotos,
distilled by age and the concentrated sun
of close inspection that burns off fluff, excuses,
broken resolutions, a crystal rendered
from sleep, from loss, from the unbearable borne,
hard-pressed by the weight of waiting:
Bright diamond! Hagia Sophia!
I am not the source or word or spirit.
I am she with whom they sit,
prudent and still as a mountain.
If you would see me,
build a home for your soul of light and glass,
warm the stones of your suffering with meaning,
attend the stars when you wake at night’s center,
find a face for me in your teachers and elders,
then look in your mirror.
I will be there with your books
and your darkness,
admiring the fugitive beauty
of purple chrysanthemums
and the faces of children
against a blue morning sky.
-Kitty Yanson 1/2022
To the reader: Thank you for taking the time to read what I have been writing (and now painting). Your time is a generosity! If you are so inclined, I invite you to follow this blog and to comment on what is here. When I was teaching creative writing at Mercy High School, we would read one another’s works and comment on them. A reader’s reactions are the most valuable guide for improvement, and I would value any of yours about content or technique or its affect on you. Even if you hated this piece, knowing why you hated it would help me a lot. So blessings, all!
May you be happy and know the root of happiness. May you be free of suffering and the root of suffering. May you dwell in peace.
Memorizing the Laws of Gravity 
I love Lady Wisdom Speaks. There is a line in part1: “ licking each melted passage off the roof of your mind”… such a powerful image of that youthful mania for knowledge— facts that give power and prestige but not empathy or compassion. I think your part 111 speaks most to me. I am old and need to find my own wisdom— a difficult task, A question:is there a typo in part one, the lines “ knowledge is power you thought, over what you never sure? Did you mean to say “ over what you’re never sure” ?
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Oh Lynne, Thanks so much. This is why they say that someone else should proofread before publishing! I was never saw its absence.
And thank you for your comment about the poem’s content. I, too, see myself in stanza three with the action going on underground. I see you there with me!
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