Bread for everyone

"...poetry, like bread, is for everyone" Martin Espoda


Poetry has always delighted, challenged and moved me. I loved reading it in elementary school when poems came only in huge rebound green books with 300 pages and no pictures. I remember having to memorize In Flanders Field in the fourth grade and then having to say it in front of the class. That scared me so, I am not fond of memorization to this day.

I love poetry for its distillation of thought. I love remembering the last lines of Frost's Snowy Day "and miles to go before I sleep, and miles to go before I sleep." I enjoy recalling the voice of my favorite English professor Dr. James Culp reciting lines from T. S. Eliot's J. Alfred Prufrock, "I grow old, I grow old....I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled." And I love drinking in snatches of Emily Dickinson's
"I'll tell you how the sun arose--a Ribbon at a time--The Steeples swam in Amethyst...." (Surely one of the most beautiful lines in American poetry!)

I am so glad that my grandchildren have beautiful picture books of poetry and books of silly poetry by Shel Silverstein and Jack Prelutsky. I hope they come to love beautiful words like I do.

Thank you Lord for the poets and artists among us who help us to see the beauty you created in different ways.