Sarah Kay reminds me that poetry isn’t just meant to be read, it’s meant to be felt. I was fortunate enough to come across her work while looking through some of the speakers at the TED convention earlier this year. TED is a nonprofit organization that provides a platform for speakers interested in sharing their ideas in the fields of Technology, Entertainment, and Design. Sarah’s first poem during her presentation was “Point B,” a beautiful piece about the lessons a mother passes on to her daughter.
In the midst of our hectic lives, there is a silent comfort in the simplicity of her poem. She is not setting out to revolutionize the world with her work; she is reminding us to appreciate life, its joys and its sorrows. Her sincerity and self-acknowledged naivety breathes hope into the listener. With the political and financial turmoil our generation has been handed, Sarah makes me believe that there is still good both in us, and around us. It’s because of her that every time I think of the waves hitting the shoreline, I am filled with an unexplainable sense of optimism about the future.
My favorite line from the poem is, “I want her to see the world through the underside of a glass-bottom boat.”
What does the world look like from the underside of a glass-bottom boat?
You are no longer in the boat to keep you safe: you are drifting in the wide, open sea, looking in on the people still in the boat, all cramped together and afraid of tipping over. Once you let go your fear of getting wet, you become a part of the undersea world you have only wondered about from afar. You learn to embrace the foreign and take a look at your own world from the outside. You understand better what our world has, what it needs, and what it can still do.
--Mira
Video Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8sSfbQk7DxE
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment