If you could but treat your life as a poem, how wonderful life would be! A poem is what it is. Poems affect you. And with each poem you read, your grasp of life grows. Something has been said, and you have heard it.

Poetry names things for you, so when you read a poem, your heart says: "Oh, yes. This is how it is. This is what I would have said if I had thought of it. The poet has said it for me. He has said it in his own words, but his words are also mine. He is like the diviner of my sense of life on earth."

Life comes to you like a poem. What poem does not encapsulate life? From one exquisite detail, a poem may arise. A poem always says more than its words. And so life is far more than its events. Events are not life. Your view of events is life.

Every time you read a poem, it is as if for the first time because you, the reader today, are not the same reader as yesterday. The words may not be changed, but you are. You have risen a notch.

Each poem you read raises you to a new level. You shed your skin. You put on royal robes. Poetry dresses you for life.

Poems work in invisible ways. You do not have to understand the meaning of a poem to know it. A poem has an effect on you whether you understand it or not. Poetry circumvents the mind. Poetry is music, and it is art. It has sound waves that stir you, and it depicts a picture that was always yours to have.

Poems are found. The poet who wrote the poem found it, the same as you. It just happened to appear to him first. And now it is shared with you. But you are as much a discoverer of it as the poet who wrote it down himself. A poem is nothing without your absorption of it.

Poems are not laborious. Poems take you out of the morass of life into a golden nugget of it. It is like you have a poem stuck in your throat, and amazingly you find it placed under your door.

Poems are adoration of life.

Prayers are adoration of life.

Even your plaints are adoration of life.

Poets are adorers. They seize every vestige of life.

Poems do not judge. They reveal. They make the ordinary extraordinary. And that is what you must do. Make your life a poem.

Music is poetry. Every brush stroke of color is poetry. Each child who appears to you is a poem of life. Life sings itself as it goes along.

Consider your life an exquisite jewel. Light emanates from it and is applied to it.

The poets are the world's seers, and so you must become a poet, if not of words, then of life. There is a need in you to see more of life than appears to the naked eye.

You are the lens of the world. Every glance from you is a new chord of music or a new brush stroke on a fabulous painting. You are indeed an artist in life. So be it.

When two photographers take a picture of the same thing, their photos are nevertheless not the same. The consciousness is not the same. And so when we speak of poetry, We speak of your consciousness. Your consciousness is the composer, the artist, the poet. Works of art are essential to your well-being.

And so today, create still lifes, make music, hold the poem of your life to you and release the light of the jewel of your life so that all men may see by it.