@ Sea With Justin Mcroberts

Sometimes, there aren’t sufficient words for a moment or a season or a feeling. The other side to that coin is that sometimes the wild, the unexpected, or inexplicable … serve the blessed purpose of breaking the words we are used to using and inviting us to make something new from their pieces. This is one way to talk about poetry. I think of the way the Scriptures of my own religious tradition open with poetry in the strange shadow of timelessness, orderlessness, and the Creative Will of a Being beyond comprehension. That same collection of histories and prophecies and reflections and wisdom texts ends with poetry in the blazing light of a hopeful future beyond either chaos or order or death or time itself. Poetry is, among other things, a way to say “There is more here. I can’t hand it to you plainly, so I’ll point in its direction and, in so doing, honor the complex and  beautiful reality of… well.. reality”For Pádraig Ó Tuama, many of the realities that frame his personal and cultural history necessitated