The inspiration for today’s poem is a poem by Kahlil Gibran called “Said a Blade of Grass” which is the poem of the day today at the Poetry Foundation.

I wondered, what if other things talked, what if they talked directly to us? What if what they said was banal nonsense, not insightful? What if these things were very focused on themselves and their own needs?

So I ended up with this poem, which is silly on its face, but I don’t think it is foolish. More, the poem is absurd and absurdity is much different than foolishness.

I was an English major years ago, and though we studied the Absurdist movement in literature, I only vaguely remember it, except to note that aside from the political aspects of the works of Kafka and Camus and others, absurdity was used to reveal truths about our lives that otherwise were locked away behind logic and reason.

So, to imagine that inanimate objects are able to talk to us, and that these objects do not offer anything profound about the universe, that’s interesting. That others believe us when we say we hear these voices, but still work to stop such madness, that is also interesting.

And ultimately, the point of all art is to be interesting, isn’t it?

The picture is from our driveway here in Pennsylvania from a snowstorm on January 23rd of 2016.

At least I think it was taken then. I am trusting the information attached to the photograph–otherwise I could have guessed many other years and other months as well.

Even if I kept a continuous written record of all such information in my life, there is no way I could have quickly read back through and figured out the date and the year.

I have become reliant on my digital footprints. I better be careful where I walk.