Poetry

When I was young, I wrote poetry. This isn't something I talk about very much, if at all. It's one of those things that I have every right to be embarrassed about, truth be told. But, for better or for worse, I and my black-and-white-speckled notebook and my purple pen spent plenty of quality time together from about 1992 to 1996.

But, somewhere about 1997, I decided to deposit my poetry in a trashcan, to be taken away by the local garbage collectors. That's a true story. I just took it and threw it all in the trash. Pretty dramatic, right?

I guess I'd decided that writing poetry wasn't worth my time. Perhaps, at eighteen, I was too old. Perhaps I was too serious. Perhaps I just had nothing to write about. Whatever the case, my poetry career came to a halt, and I haven't much thought about it since then. I definitely haven't talked about it since, well, I don't remember when.

Honestly, I haven't much cared for poetry for years. There's something about poetry that's a little too emotive, a little too mushy, or a little too something. I preferred looking at poetry as an English major. Then I could take a poem and dissect it, take a scalpel to it, as to a "patient etherized upon a table."

I mean, words are serious business, and you don't go getting all mushy over something that's serious business. But, maybe you do. Maybe you sometimes have to. Maybe there are times when being serious isn't the end of it all. Maybe we need poetry in ways we can't imagine because poetry frees us from the way we normally think of language and of life.

I was thinking about poetry a few weeks ago when I was out running. Actually, I was thinking about writing, about all the things I'd like to write and a little about things I used to write. So naturally, I started thinking about poetry.

At the time of my run, I was in the middle of reading Searching for God Knows What. In the book, Donald Miller discusses that parts of the Bible are written as poetry. He reflects,

"I can't tell you how beautiful I thought this was; I had always suspected language was quite limited in its ability to communicate the intricate mysteries of truth" (55).

The word "limited" just stood out to me. I thought of how limited the world felt when I stopped writing poetry, how there was less beauty in it, how it changed the way I saw the world and felt about it, how nothing had a ring of poetry about it. Because, through poetry, I tried to see more beauty in the world, and, when you go looking for beauty, your thoughts often turn to the One who created such beauty.

So, I tried to open my eyes to it, to all of the beauty around me as I ran down the street. This was difficult to do, given the fact that it was overcast. But, do you know what happened? It started raining on me, a sort of torrential downpour. Now, like I said, I'm a very serious person who doesn't like to get rained on. But, I'd never been happier for such a thing to happen. I stopped running and just walked through it.

I looked like a complete idiot. And perhaps a little like a drowned rat. The thing is, I didn't care one bit. Right there, standing on the side of the road and drenched in rain, I'd found some poetry again. And, it wasn't a sonnet or anything that contrived. It existed in the simplicity of all that was around me, as sure as the God who inspired the poetry in His Word. And, suddenly, the world felt a little less limited, a little more like something only the mysteries of poetry can explain.