Hello, Blog!  What use is having a space like this if I’m not going to think out loud in it? The friend to whom I write emails almost daily will vouch for the fact that I’m not without opinions and reactions concerning current events, poetry doings, and general philosophy. Yesterday, alerted by another poet friend, I found myself quoted on someone else’s blog from this blog!  I was flattered. It felt like being a little bit famous.

I am prompted to philosophy today by the sudden death last week of a poet* highly regarded in the poetry circles with whom I connect. As I lamented in my poem “Obituary”—So she is dead before we even thought/that she was sick…

In emails, Facebook posts, and forum conversations, she is universally praised for both her poetry and her personality.  Her recently published poetry collection remains as a legacy we can all turn to in admiring remembrance. But her beautiful present—and presence—has been ripped from the earth. Me?  Well, I can no longer be considered “too young” to suddenly die.

All my life, I have been adamantly future-facing.  This is a good thing in that it compels me to be always considering what I will do next, rather than dwelling on what I’ve done already.  Hopes and ambitions seem to motivate me a great deal more than achievements and rewards.

This way of approaching life becomes especially vivid to me while I’m reading the work of dozens of living poets in books, literary magazines, and online. In their bios, they list their publications, awards, degrees, and nominations for prestigious prizes.  These lists tend to remind me of the many credits I have not accumulated, while obliterating from my mind the many credits I have.

I wrote a poem about that called “Poet Envy.”  It begins, Remember, darling, you are no one else.  And it ends, …There’s ever only one of you. My perpetual discomfort seems to lie in not knowing when enough is enough, or perhaps when I am enough.

I wrap it all up in my poem “Old Lady With No Complaints”—My bit in time seems infinitely small/its prizes insufficient after all.

So, what IS the prize I seek?  What is the thing I’ve been chasing after for seventy-five years?

Oh, that’s easy:  Love.

I don’t mean romantic love (but surely that) or family love (definitely that) or the love of an audience (obviously that).  I want even more.  I want the biggest, deepest, most unconditional, eternal, delightful love a human being can experience.

Can you imagine what my idea of “God” looks like?

*Susan de Sola [Rodstein], author of Frozen Charlotte from Able Muse Press.