Yesterday, to commemorate 9/11, the assistant principal at our school read the poem “One” by Cheryl Sawyer (you can find it here). My students, who were only two years old at the occurrence of 9/11, stood absolutely motionless. I later thought about how the poem swirled around the room from the speaker above, how the words surrounded us and spoke to something deep within our hearts. This is the power of poetry: It is what we turn to in our most poignant moments.
This is the power of poetry: It is what we turn to in our most poignant moments.
At funerals, we read poems. At weddings, we read poems. At graduations, at retirement parties, at anniversary celebrations, we read poems. When we elect a president, we read a poem. When we are at our most elated or our most devastated, only a poem can contain our feelings. This is not because poems are neat little packages that are easy to digest on the spot; poems can be messy little grenades or sharp, jagged rocks. Rather, it is because the white space of poetry leaves room for our hearts to beat alongside the words. The empty space, the lines broken open, lets our spirits fill in the deepest, most unspeakable parts of this human existence. It’s the language of poetry that’s in our DNA, not the smooth, practiced rhetoric of everyday life. And even when it’s painful, somehow poems cleanse us; even when a poem uncovers a wound, we turn back to reality somehow a bit lightened.
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