Wing bones

As someone who studies poetry, the hardest question for me is "what is a poem?" What is a poem and what does a poet do? If the question is asked to a thousand different people, there will be a thousand different answers. If it is asked to a person a thousand times, the person will have a hundred different answers. Is a poem a burst of one's feelings or is it a collection of abstruse verses? If asked now, I would say the poem is a tomb of secrets, based on the poem that I'm about to tell you. 　

In his book ‘The Poetic Principle,’ Edgar Allan Poe writes that poems are a world of secrets. A secret is something sure to exist in our minds. Secrets are not supposed to be told but they always want to be released in the form of words. And poems capture them quietly: secrets in our minds, secrets that only I know, secrets that want to be disclosed even though they may only be half-understood if divulged. Poets are the explorers looking for those secrets. The poet says in the book that everyone has a secret is the secret.

Would there also be a secret for me, who is leading a pathetic day-to-day life? What if I'm not worthy of harboring a secret because I'm hopeless and miserable? The poet says the moment when you encounter such self-doubt is the proof that you "have a secret." Unwittingly, the secret lands on your back. When you crouch down low, the wing bones start to stick out. They make you feel like you once fluttered about or will flutter about someday. Those wing bones tell you the secret that there is definitely something inside you.