Looking for poetry in the signal

I am enjoying, as I age, the wisdom and experience that lets me see additional layers in things.

Like poetry.

I recall struggling to decipher meaning in poetry (but enjoying that process) when I was younger. I can read those same poems now, and even others that I haven’t read before, and I “get it” more quickly and easily. Maybe you have to have a certain amount of lived experience under your belt to be able to do that.

For instance, what I once thought was a poem about love, now I suddenly see that it was clearly about loss. Although sometimes those are the same thing, viewed through a different lens. Did the author intend it that way from the start, and I just saw what I needed to at the time? I don’t know. Maybe they didn’t know either.

Here’s another good one, this time by Anne Sexton, that I really get on a whole different level now that I’m closer to the age of the witch than I was when I first read it as a teenager.

The Witch’s Life

by Anne Sexton

When I was a child
there was an old woman in our neighborhood whom we called The Witch.
All day she peered from her second story
window
from behind the wrinkled curtains
and sometimes she would open the window
and yell: Get out of my life!
She had hair like kelp
and a voice like a boulder.

I think of her sometimes now
and wonder if I am becoming her.
My shoes turn up like a jester’s.
Clumps of my hair, as I write this,
curl up individually like toes.
I am shoveling the children out,
scoop after scoop.
Only my books anoint me,
and a few friends,
those who reach into my veins.
Maybe I am becoming a hermit,
opening the door for only
a few special animals?
Maybe my skull is too crowded
and it has no opening through which
to feed it soup?
Maybe I have plugged up my sockets
to keep the gods in?
Maybe, although my heart
is a kitten of butter,
I am blowing it up like a zeppelin.
Yes. It is the witch’s life,
climbing the primordial climb,
a dream within a dream,
then sitting here
holding a basket of fire.