Treasured Words
After Jesus died there was a sense of urgency to remember and to record the things that Jesus said and did.[1] There were so many things done and words said, John in his report exclaimed:
if every one of them were written down, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.
So, they went through a process of distilling the words. What do we include? What do we omit? We do this when we’ve had a loved one pass away. We start to think, “What words, sayings and mannerisms do you remember and want to preserve from their life?”
When the torrent of tweets is flushed down the drain
and the storm of media posts drift away,
what words will you keep in your treasure chest?
What phrases will you remember and cherish?
What lines will lighten your way, comfort your mind and be balm to your soul?
What mantra will serve as your anchor?
Salve that Soothes
When twenty-two-year-old, Amanda Gorman, stood at the lectern at President Biden’s inauguration, she spoke sanity, wisdom and hope to a battered and divided nation:
Let the globe, if nothing else, say this is true:
That even as we grieved, we grew,
That even as we hurt, we hoped,
That even as we tired, we tried.
Stuffing Ourselves with Sweetness
It is especially at funerals and tragic occasions of conflict and loss that we look to the poets for the words to say, in our attempt to make sense and to mediate healing.
Margaret Renkl in her New York Times article, Thank God for the Poets, pays tribute to the poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins and W H Auden that helped her through her grief.
She is grateful for poems that have given solace, such as Wendell Berry’s The Peace of Wild Things:
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
Margaret Renkl also goes to Mary Oliver’s poem, The Kingfisher. Renkl writes, “The poets are forever telling us to look for this kind of peace, to stuff ourselves with sweetness, to fill ourselves up with loveliness.”
Where Do We Start?
The Australian musician, Paul Kelly, has recently published an anthology of 300 of his favourite poems entitled, ‘Love is Strong as Death’.[2]
In his evocative Introduction to this collection, Kelly sketches his journey into poetry. He recognises that many people feel that reading poetry is difficult but he admits that only a small fraction of the poems from any poet he has read has “knocked my socks off.” But despite such a low strike rate, he says, “Finding a poem you love requires patience, luck and a willingness to cover a wide range.”
Lovers of the music of Paul Kelly will know that many of his songs are steeped in poetry from Scripture and from a wide variety of sources. This which might be a thought to inspire budding song writers. He writes in his Introduction:
Poems are to be passed on. They’re pocketable, transferable. Little mind bombs. Wherever you are, on the tram or stuck in a queue or waiting on a friend, they’re fun to commit to memory. That’s what poetry has been ever since Homer. Something to memorise. The great poets have the knack of writing unforgettable lines.
Write Your Own
The poet, Naomi Shihab Nye, (the daughter of a Palestinian father and an American mother) believes that most of us ‘think in poems’ whether we know it or not. She encourages us to notice, to take “a long, loving look,” to become more aware of what is important, to nourish our ability to grow in our perceptions and to write down what we see and feel.
She believes that to carry a notebook is a sign that we are expecting new thoughts to come to us.
Naomi Shihab Nye encourages people to become more aware of the common, ordinary, scenes and things that we experience every day. People used to ask her, “Why do you write about common things, normal, regular, little things?” And she’d say, “Well, what do you have in your life? I’m not living in Star Trek. I have common things in my life. What else do I have? But I don’t think that the things are, themselves, common. I think it’s a miracle that anything works.”
Naomi encourages people to “use a single word as an oar that could get you through the days, just by holding a word, thinking about it differently, and seeing how that word rubs against other words, how it interplays with other words.”[3]
National Poetry Month
Many countries observe a National Poetry Month to raise the profile of poets and to increase the awareness and value of poetry in all its forms. Any time is a good time to start your own collection of texts, proverbs and poems that speak to you. As Paul Kelly said, “Poems are to be passed on.” Don’t be daunted by the famous poets who have penned the classics. Carry your notebook and commit your thoughts to paper and to memory.
Believe the words of Walt Whitman:
After the seas are all cross'd, (as they seem already cross'd,)
After the great captains and engineers have accomplish'd their work,
After the noble inventors, after the scientists, the chemist, the
geologist, ethnologist,
Finally shall come the poet worthy that name,
The true son of God shall come singing his songs.[4]
Questions for Reflection:
1. What are the precious words (from the Bible or elsewhere) that you hold on to?
2. How did these words come to you with a sense of value and importance?
3. Any thoughts on how these words hold you or heal you or touch you?
Geoff Pound
geoffpound@gmail.com
[1] John 21:24-25: “24 This is the disciple who is testifying to these things and has written them, and we know that his testimony is true. 25 But there are also many other things that Jesus did; if every one of them were written down, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.”
[2] Paul Kelly, Love is Strong as Death: Poems Chosen by Paul Kelly Penguin; 1st edition (19 November 2019).
[3] Krista Tippett in conversation with Naomi Shihab Nye, On Being, “Before You Know Kindness As the Deepest Thing Inside…” March 4, 2021.
[4] Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, Book 26, Passage to India, 5.