04/04/2026
Hey Everyone,
It’s April, which everyone knows is National Poetry Month. Well, probably not everyone. Maybe not even many. Regardless, in addition to your sitting practice and studies, try to work reading some poetry into your weekly schedule this month.
There’s something about reading poetry that’s different from our usual ways of reading. It resists our habits. The words of poems—their cadence, music, and imagery—move us to the white space surrounding them, much as the Buddhadharma directs us less to an intellectual understanding of what it’s saying, though there may be that too, and more to what animates it, what cannot be captured in words though it can be sensed in their articulation.
I think the reason reading a poem can be daunting for some is that it is often approached from the perspective of trying to “understand” it. And much like what happens when we read koans similarly, poems can seem inscrutable when we do so.
I remember reading William Carlos Williams’s poem “The Red Wheelbarrow” many years ago. In case you don’t know it, Williams’s poem is a lucid evocation of the realization that what is essential can reside in the humble and mundane, captured in lines that themselves are humble:
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens
In the library copy of the book I was reading, somebody had scrawled between the first two stanzas: “Does it?” I laughed when I saw the question. But it is the kind of thing we do all the time: we don’t trust our eyes and so make things difficult by imposing “understanding” on them. Once you ask “Does it?” of Williams’s poem, it somehow becomes something different from what Williams had written, even though the words are exactly the same.
It is a lesson we can take not only to reading but to our daily life, too. Just know that right now, a lot depends on that red wheel barrow, no need to debate.
In honor of National Poetry Month, we will be displaying a changing series of poems in our library. If there is a poem you think we should display, let us know. Additionally, at some point this month we will also be making available to the public an overdue chapbook of poems titled Lost among Wildflowers, a small collection of poems written by students who’d taken a class at Dharma Field of the same name that had explored the poems and legend of Japanese poet and Zen master Ryōkan. The collection will be available by donation. We’ll make an announcement when it’s ready to be purchased.
See the update below for information of other events and offerings at Dharma Field in April.
In the spirit of the month, I’ll close with a poem of mine:
COMPASSIONATE ADVICE
Even though you know
the birds will eat
them, leave a trail
of crumbs anyway.
At least the birds
get fed.
Take care and be well,
—Steve Matuszak, Dharma Field head teacher
