You could never call me a prolific poet. These thirty-one poems have taken me as many years to write.
But there is a reason for this glacial flow.
Rather than being an expression of a sudden insight or an inspirational event, each of these poems captures, instead, my own slow seeding, growth, and flowering awareness of something understood. This awareness-aging process takes time. Lots of time. Even if the writing of the poem itself happens within hours or a day, the necessary gestation happens over time.
These aren’t poems so much as they are the worded history of a backyard vegetable garden: planted, cultivated, harvested, and then shared with family and friends.
They are maps with word-pins stuck in them reminding me of where I always am.
They are endless security camera footage where one frozen frame solves the whole damn mystery. Something like that.
Or maybe I’m just a slow poet. Who knows?
I do know that when I read these poems myself over time, I don’t tire of them. This could be artistic narcissism, but I don’t think so. What it really means is that they aren’t mine. The separated, individual me didn’t write them. The more Timeless Me did.
These poems are ultimately about that: the migration of identity from the separated self to the Timeless Self.
Which is a perfect segue to the Timeless You. If you relate to these poems; if they touch you in any way or coincide with your own experience, we will have connected in love, in mutual recognition, even for just a moment.
And isn’t that ultimately what all poetry
all art
all love
is about,
experiencing our shared Oneness?
A DANGEROUS WORK OF ART
Recently I published A Dangerous Work of Art and other poems.
Available in print on Amazon.
USA: Amazon
Elsewhere in the world: please visit the Amazon site for your region.
A Dangerous Work of Art
From you
A poem is demanded
Or a song from your soul
Or a dangerous work of art.
Do it
Or be damned
To a life as a scribe
In a courtroom empty.
Will your poem
Be fire-filled
Sanitized
Or never consigned to ink?
Will your song
Be sung by ten million
By one
Or by no one at all?
Will your art
Be timeless
Praised by liars
Or noticed by no one?
It's your poem
Your song
Your art
Your life
And daily decision.
What will it be?
Passage from A Dangerous Work of Art
REVIEWS
"Tej Steiner's weaving together of words in a moving poetic flow is masterful. This is a collection of poems that invites you to read them again and again and deepen your experience of the wisdom they impart. An unfolding experience!"
"Tej’s collection of poems written with cleverness tap emotions, expands the heart and deepens our insight to our True Self. "
"Tej Steiner's weaving together of words in a moving poetic flow is masterful. This is a collection of poems that invites you to read them again and again and deepen your experience of the wisdom they impart. An unfolding experience!"
"Tej’s collection of poems written with cleverness tap emotions, expands the heart and deepens our insight to our True Self." — Dan
"What excellent poems, Tej. Are you and Hafiz related?" — Marga
"Thank you so much for these deeply moving poems." — Linda M
"I have a client who was traumatized in her job as a maternity nurse but the conventional, abusive medical practices and by bullying by doctors and head nurses. I read her The Maternity Ward just now and it opened up a whole new level of releasing for her. Tears and coughing for 20-30 minutes, and I cried too. Amazing poem." — Paul