"You Are Living in A Poem"

The poet Naomi Shihab Nye says that she often tells her elementary aged students that they are "living in a poem”. A poem is not something you read or write, but it’s a way of perceiving in the world.  Then she asks them to write about their life inside a poem.

This week, I happened upon a translation of a verse from the book of Ephesians in the New Testament of the Christian Bible.  Ephesians 2:10 proclaims “We are the poems of God”.  I just love that idea!!  What would it mean in my life if I understood myself to be a “poem of God”.  --- or of the universe, or of the goddess, or of “Mystery” or the Universe…. What is the purpose of a poem?  What kind of poem do I want to be?  If I am a poem, are the trees and birds and ocean waves also poems?  Presumably so.  In any case, I like imagining that world!

And then, this month, my friend and colleague, Rev. Dr. Kathy Hurt has a new book out;  “Psalms for All our Days and Ways”.  (See it by clicking HERE ).  The book is a collection of rewritten Psalms.  These Psalms are not directed to God, but rather to the reader.  Psalms about everyday life and experience.  I love the idea that we could envision our experience as a Psalm.  The word Psalm means a sacred song or hymn. 

What a juxtaposition of all of these ideas – we are a poem, we live inside a poem, we are a sacred song or hymn.  It does change the way I think of myself in the world!

Borrowing liberally from all these sources, I have written my own poem;

All around us,

a poem is being spoken,

a song is being sung –

in the way leaves rustle

against one another

and another wave arrives

on every shore on earth.

And the birds, oh the birds

are reciting poem-songs

every dawn, every dusk.

The rhyming of the

church bell, the clock tower,

the whispered poems of buds

becoming blossom,

the ode of every-changing light,

and, of course, the stars reciting

their tiny haikus all the time.

Your own untethered breath,

a steady ode to life,

a repeating pantoum.

The world offers us poems,

why not learn them by heart?

            ~Penny Hackett-Evans