once more into the breach…or fill the gap with poetry

I had been casting about for a theme for International Poetry Month 2014 for almost a year when my husband, Matthew Broussard, made a series of paintings on the theme of ambiguous and iconic gestures in December. As soon as I saw the painting “Leap” the phrase in the heading above came to mind.

After a year of listing to news packed with war and disaster, perhaps the unaltered quote from Shakespeare’s Henry V would be more apt – although a quick recap of the years news will tell us that the gap was filled with dead of every nationality: the building collapse in Dar es Salaam, the Fertilizer plant in West, Texas, the Boston Marathon bombing, the constant undercurrent of the financial and employment crisis in Europe, a devastating typhoon in the Philippines, drowning of migrants off of Lampedusa, the wars in South Sudan, Syria…does your heart feel like lead yet, are you about to click on a link to something else, anything else?

Poets are charged with throwing their works into the breach, paving the unseeable future with words that transform the painful, the splendid and the ordinary of where we are now and where we have been, into where we are going…making the leap, perhaps of faith or perhaps of desperation or even of joy. The future is there: blindingly dark, spattered with patches of dense brightness. We’re on the precipice, hanging above the clouds, now….LEAP