The Spirituality of Writing Poetry

Written for a church series on the spirituality found in otherwise secular practices.

Why do I write poetry?

For the purity and possibility
in a blank sheet of paper,
For the close to endless presence
of words to conjure,
For the creative act that taps
into the divinest of works…

Why do I write poetry?

To feel okay feeling deeply (though
to everyone else aloof and quiet).
To get lost in words when thinking
too much leaves nowhere to go.
To memorialize a moment and know
belonging despite unwelcoming worlds.

Why do I write poetry?

There’s a poem I wrote some years ago,
written early when I had much to learn.
The poem’s theme was the art form itself,
the gift it’s been and continues to be.

...Unpathened white snow.
an unclaimed plain.
I express, yet hide,
and work until it’s let go.
Why do I write poetry?

The internal life so important to me
is content staying hidden,
most of the time at least. When
the hidden must be expressed,
I turn to paper and pen, to Word’s
empty window, blinking cursor, and keyboard.

What guided you to begin?

1.

Senior year heartache,
I, the heartbreakee.

Poetry first began for me
as song lyrics, sappy ones, I’d say.
But they nicely apply to poetry now:

I can’t fight her sweet memory.
It keeps coming back like waves in the sea.
I can’t fight this feeling. She lingers in my mind.
All I can do is wish you were here
to dry these tears.

2.

A freshman at college,
I bought a journal at the campus bookstore,
Diary-like entries soon ensued.

Eventually, poetry began to appear.
Here’s my first pen-stab
in the dark of poetry’s page.

Twigs scattered underneath the
fresh white snow -
I hear them snap, yet I can’t
see them break…

This one didn’t go away.
Here is the edit I ended on (so far):

Twigs scatter beneath the snow.
I hear but don’t see them break.
Bare trees grow out of the snow,
the snow that lays on the roots,
tree roots that grow up to sun-vanishings
behind evergreens and ever-blues.
The rock’s opaque gray is lightened
By this undiscovered lake.
The immaculate remains
Until the warm day melts her away.
The lake still will not move,
covered with coldness to blame.
Walking softly, twigs break.
Blinded, I hear them snap.

Guidance had become
less heartache than yearning.

3.

Eventually added
to inspiration’s short list
(of heartache and yearning) was this:
finding love and her complexities.

Making sense of my internal landscape,
where thoughts, emotions, experiences live:
poetry is close to perfect for that.

What motivates me to continue?

1.

“Motivates” is too ambitious a word
meant for the more self-disciplined.
Being disciplined is now too much work,
my work with more sermony words
work enough.

“Inspiration” better fits.
I write when inspiration hits.

And when it really does,
I can’t help but tread that unpathened snow.

2.

Poetry is always a call a way,
welcoming as a listener, as the mentor she is.

Joy and meaning is found there
listening to her, my mentor.
sitting and waiting with
a page with room, empty like me.
She says, make your way in the world of words.

And how I love this world!
Rhythm and rhyme and lines,
the art of suturing words together
as if a blanket or an ancient text.
Epiphanies may be found on the other end,
and in the editing that never ends.

What inspires me to continue?

I am a poem God wrote.
I am a poet and feel the need to write back.

What have I discovered about myself since writing poetry?

1.

In this brown journal of mine,
There is a scribbled poem,
my first fully realized one,

One validated externally
and then within me more.

2.

The summer before my sophomore year,
I at home wrote a poem painfully born
from the fledgling insight into the fact

that my family did not have a lot or enough,

Returning to school, for Fall quarter,
a poetry contest was offered
by Cedarville’s literary journal.

I submitted the poem composed that summer.
It would win the prize, fifty dollars of impetus
to keep writing and honing my newfound craft.

I’d later be asked to recite the poem
for a poetry reading soon thereafter,
one the English department sponsored.
Here, the younger me read:



Hope Faith Allsfair

Hope Faith Allsfair looks out the window, as
she washes the dishes.
The snow – like
the water through the
drain – cleanses the winter air.
In her mind’s ears
she hears her two boys play.
But intently she
waits for a miracle that
she knows will come.
She reads the horoscopes.
They told her today that its on its way.
They seem to say the same
thing everyday – day after
day after day. But
the heart needs to grasp onto something.
Her son Someday
colors rainbows red,
blue, green, orange, and
yellow with a black
crayon, while his brother
Reality cries in the dark snow.
Hope Faith Allsfair writes her son who
escaped the loving home,
but not its sorrow.
The letter states: Someday, oneday,
you’re going to be rich.

Love,
Mom

3.

I don’t command attention naturally.
Any charisma in me is subliminal,
Any sense of humor sensed only
to those who know me well.

My gift, the one given to me, I believe?
My capacity to see the world around me,

To process and write it down.

Let me move through the world like a poet,
more than like a prophet.

Has writing poetry affirmed my purpose and path in life?

1.

My purpose and path in life?
To me, it is quite simple.
Nat King Cole sang the words:
“The greatest thing you’ll ever learn
is just to love and be loved in return.”

I tweak that truth this way:
“To love and to honor others’ love for me.”
Does poetry affirm this? I think so.

2.

I seek to love the ones I’m close to,
love them the best I know how.
To love the stranger, the holy other,
this is the faith I seek to live out.

The love I’m blessed to know,
I seek to honor this in word and deed.
The give and the receive of love,
I envelop it all in poems.
One sees and hears them
in the lines and stanzas I’ve written.

Holly, the muse of my life, she lives
prominently in many of my words.

To Holly

The gold-paved path they call the only way
distracted with its narrow streets and lost me.
While lost, potholes jutted and jarred and frayed.
The oil-black streets were golden, I once believed.
The script in red ink gave direction to my show,
and to me, an actor who was to simply mouth
the words. From the high stage, I looked below,
a good actor who could no longer deny doubt.
The torn curtain jolted to a close, to thick black
where a light was cast on its own lucid view.
In the spotlight I adhered and came to lack
Everything. I found my way home when I saw you.
You were a streetlight piloting me to a familiar place,
an encompassing compass I, who was lost, embraced.

3.

My son Corey is another muse.
Here’s one from when he was a baby,
one incorporating another theme
I’ve focused on a few times:

My Son Watches Me Shoot Baskets

The Reformed Church's bells
sing a familiar hymn,
one whose melody I recall
but whose words I've forgotten.

The B-ball court besides
gives backbeat to the ringing tune
as basketball meets pavement,
as its echoes feed the afternoon.

Five-months into his life,
my son seems to ponder the sight
of his father shooting baskets,
the sights and sounds within, around it,

the rhythm and its solace,
its movement and meditation -
the ball, the netted, ready rim,
balance, form, concentration.

In this moment of worship,
of this sacred confluence
where music, jump shots,
and lineage meet,

a quiet epiphany smiles,
a more personal God ensues.
Then my son cries
no longer content to watch
my missed and made goals.
I walk him home in his stroller
beneath a warmer lit sun.

4.

Then there’s my parents.
I’ve written poems about them, and to them, too.
My dad, our complex relationship,
is in particular conspicuous:

Morning Coffee Awakening: To My Dad

The hard heels of those black boots
against the linoleum floor -
the sound again wakes me.
On this day, each step sounds
a reverent silence,
a silence memorials make.
Sixteen year-old me
departs from dreams to listen
to the routine my father never forgot to face.
The pre-dawn liturgy of dad making coffee,
The ritual, the aroma, the caffeine's waking –
Such prayerful moments –
for these I thank you, Lord
The faucet's flow cleans the carafe.
It’s forceful stream fills, falls, spills over.
The faucet then stops.
Dad empties old grounds from yesterday.
I get out of bed
and climb like a child to the window screen
and face the light
As if kneeling in prayer. Trees dance
as the coffee scent pervades
The sacred space.
This sun-drenched morning,
newness, light, summer -
Morning stills. Every unheard sip,
every heard step my dad takes:
Could a day be more awake, O God?
Could a moment be more alive with Your breath?
My father swallows the last sip.
He notices the time, it seems.
Keys collide, chiming goodbye.
The door opens, shuts.
The heels of those boots find each exiting step.
The ignition turns; the engine softly rumbles.
The gravel crackles beneath the four tires turning.
The car decrescendos into the distance.
The face of this morning looks to the day.
I take my first steps as if never created.
Thank you, God, for this, your precious gift.

5.

My seeking to love humanity and each human,
my striving to Christlike compassion,
often makes its way into my work.
To connect to the vulnerable,
join in their suffering,
I seek to embody this way of being.

My first and last published poems are examples,
one in the wake of the Rodney King tragedy,
the other more universal, in the face of suffering:

‘It’ Is Injustice

A spring day,
children play
in a sandbox of mud and clay
imagining a world
in which they
wished to stay.
Across the block,
in reality time, time tick-tocks.
Other “theys” throw rocks
that no man can block or stop.

“We’ll beat the Rap, after all we’re the...”
Peacemakers’ unjust fight.
It is black and white.
It is enough to fright.
We see the sight of justice’s plight
so clear, so real, so harsh in all its might.

Deaf and blind to what’s right,
those other “theys” say, “so what.”

“Pictures say more than words.”
Yet it seems absurd.
We see the pictures.
Truth is obscured.
Justice is blurred,
If not gone unheard.

Someone said, “it looks like war.”
It was silent before.
It was what we tried to ignore.
But it comes back like a sore.
Amid the sheep it’s a lion’s roar.
So we close the doors,
but the wounds just open more.

“What’s the score,
is the team winning yours?”
The flagpole is bare.
Injustice ripples in the air.

A spring day,
We play
in a sandbox of mud and clay.
We see a disillusioned world in which we
stay.


To Kwanum, the Compassionate

the universe’s tears in your eyes -
i see them, hear them, touch them.
i will allow my brokenness to bow
before you, before all broken and breaking.
i will allow my self to sink through water
to the ground of suffering and arise anew.
cry, oh tears. let each teardrop mourn then praise.
from pain to hope. from nothing to mountains.
and when i've climbed mountains, i will meet you.
we will tarry there for moments and go back,
bowing before all likewise broken and breaking,
letting the moments we’ve known to move hope.

Where/how have I encountered the sacred in writing poetry?

To love and honor others’ love for me.
Included in loving others –
not just included, but encompassing –
is my loving God defined as love.

And so I write poetry now as prayers,
as meditations in and lyrics to the sacred.

Prayer, meditation,
sacred music and poetry,
all rise from the same source
all seek and try to return there,
to the theosis of meaning and beauty.

In writing poetry, I tap the divine
singing truth, meaning and beauty,
immersed myself in the river of the Spirit.
I wade and drift there on that river
and wait for water to flow.

Poem in a Manger

At just the right time,
the poem was handed to me,
A poem clothed in bands of soft cotton,
a poem resounding
between a cry and a coo upon
his first sight of this world.
From his mother’s arms, quietly given
for me to hold,
That poem came when I needed it most,
a necessary word
of comfort, a meaningful word to
a day starved for meaning,
a beautiful word to an ugly, angry age.
A liberating word
to the world, to me, latched
to loneliness, hurt, grief.
This fragile, resilient poem, I held him in my arms,
read his face, his eyes, his soft sounds, marveling
through tears at the holy moment.
How quickly a heart revives.
This child, this perfect poem,
heaven swoops straight down,
down to these earthy eyes, this pining heart,
these empty hands,
this restless mind, grounding me in a love
I kept forgetting,
a love I kept forgetting never lets me go,
resurrecting
love’s truth, making it new again, hallowing this life.
Awake, I give the poem Emmanuel
back to Mary, return home,
and like her ponder – and ponder still – all of this,
ponder it all in the room
of a renovated heart.
The word becomes flesh and joins us here and now.