Poem Of The Week - Go Out And Listen To The Frogs

Every week, I will share a poem with you all. It's going to be pretty random, just an opportunity for all of us to experience new poems and discuss what we like, what we don't like. Don't worry, I'm not planning to make this a series of Rachel's favourite poems. I'm going to be looking in anthologies and magazines and I'm going to try to focus on lesser known poets. Essentially, the aim is to share poetry with you that you might not know.

As always, be respectful of other people's opinions and be respectful of the writer, too.

So for the first installment, I've flicked through the most recent issue of Rattle magazine and found this.

Go Out And Listen To The Frogs

by J.R. Solonche

Go out and listen to the frogs, he said.

They speak for you.

So I went out to listen to the frogs

as he said, for he was a poet and spoke

with passion and audacious authority.

And in the moonlight at the pond,

I listened to the frogs speaking to one another,

and after a while I decided that the frogs

were not speaking for me but for themselves,

and after a little while longer,

I decided that I wanted the moonlight

to speak for me instead of the frogs,

the moonlight, which was so much louder

than the frogs, the moonlight,

which was not confined to seasonal speaking

but which spoke through the year,

the moonlight, which was so much clearer

than the frogs, so much colder and more silver.

So I went out to the moon-pond and listened

to the moonlight speak for me.

And now, when they ask me, I will answer,

with passion of my own, and with my own

audacious authority: Go out and listen to the moon.

It speaks for you.

Under contributor notes, J.R. Solonche writes: I write poetry because I can't write music. In my poem 'Go Out And Listen To The Frogs,' the 'he' who said, 'Go out and listen to the frogs. They speak for you' was Galway Kinnell. It was during a Q & A session after he read at the community college where I taught in the Hudson Valley. I didn't have to take his advice because we hear thousands of frogs in upstate New York whether we want to listen or not. I wrote my poem as an answer both to him and the frogs.