Poetry Thursday - inkwell Daybreak by Jean Valentine

Drawing by Vija Celmins (via)

Inkwell    daybreak Inkwell          daybreak stairway                        stairway Dear girls and boys, would you go with me and tell me back to the beginning --so we can understand! the journey of our lives where we met with cruelty but kindness, too, and nosed up out of the cold dark water, and walked on our fins... -- Jean Valentine Door in the Mountain: New & Collected Poems

I heard this on the Poetry Foundation's Poem of the Day podcast - listen to it online here, or - along with many other of her poems - on her own website.

Jean Valentine was born in Chicago in 1934 and published her first book of poems in 1965; it won the Yale Younger Poets award, and another dozen books have followed. "Her lyric poems" says the Poetry Foundation site,

 delve into dream lives with glimpses of the personal and political. In the New York Times Book Review, David Kalstone said of her work, “Valentine has a gift for tough strangeness, but also a dreamlike syntax and manner of arranging the lines of ... short poems so as to draw us into the doubleness and fluency of feelings.”