I’ve long had the idea that I might create my anthology of poems. Now I’m making it happen. Many of us must have a collection of poems we love, a collection that might say more about us than almost anything else—our writings, pictures, friends and family, crimes, and misdemeanours. A collection of poems reflects our soul, whatever that is.

I’ve stolen the title of  the blog from “The Rattle Bag,” a collection of the favourite poems of Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes. I’m reading my way through the book for the second time, and I thoroughly recommend it. They describe how they accumulated the poems one by one and piled them high to create a cairn. I’ll aim to share a poem daily or thereabouts, and it’ll be interesting to see if I run out of poems before I die. I doubt it.

Here’s the first poem, by Judith Wright (1915-2000), one of Australia’s finest poets who was much concerned about nature and Aboriginal land rights. I’ve spent more than a year reading my through her “Collected Poems,” which I also recommend.

In Praise of Marriage

Not till life halved, and parted
one from the other,
did time begin, and knowledge;
sorrow, delight.
Terror of being apart, being lost,
made real the night.
Seeking and finding made
yesterday, now, and tomorrow;
and love was realized first
when those two came together.

So, perilously joined,
lighted in one small room,
we have made all things true.
Out of the I and the you
spreads this field of power,
that all that waits may come,
all possibles be known—
all futures step from their stone
and pasts come into flower.