National Poetry Day - Just for a Time by Maya Angelou

Poetry is pure joy. Poetry is bottled beauty. Poetry is love.

Poetry, according to Lucy Mangan, has the “power to move you at such a visceral level ...It gets under your defences, all those beautiful, perfect lines, refined, honed over weeks and months and years, smelted down by their writers from the bulky emotional ore with which we ordinary people customarily make do, so that only the purest form remains.”

The theme for the British National Poetry Day on 7^th October 2010 is ‘Home’.

Sometimes a person reminds you of what it is like to feel at home. That may last ‘just for a time’ ...

Just for a Time

Oh how you used to walk
With that insouciant smile
I liked to hear you talk
And your style
Pleased me for a while.

You were my early love
New as a day breaking in Spring
You were the image of
Everything
That caused me to sing.

I don't like reminiscing
Nostalgia is not my forte
I don't spill tears
On yesterday's years
But honesty makes me say,
You were a precious pearl
How I loved to see you shine,
You were the perfect girl.
And you were mine.
For a time.
For a time.
Just for a time.

Maya Angelou