If you could see that you are a poet

“Like the nectar of the bee, which turns to honey the dust of flowers, or like that liquor which converts lead into gold, the poet has a breath that fills out words, gives them light and color. He knows wherein consists their charm, and by what art enchanted structures may be built with them.”
–Joseph Joubert

The world could use a bit more poetry. I wrote to a group of friends one late summer day that I had “waved until their I-love-you hand signs disappeared around the corner and I couldn’t see them any more”. The next morning I received a poem from my friend Sarah.

Waving at your I-Love-You hands
Watching them fade away,
Waiting to see them come back again,
Back to our home someday.

Missing the touch of I-Love-You hands,
Stroking my hair and face,
Holding, strengthening, carefully keeping
The world in its over-there place.

Knowing wherever I-Love-You hands go
How calloused and hard they become,
That their softness stays in the love in your eyes,
And they’ll return and your words will come.

No more need for I-Love-You hands
When I-Love-You feet bring you home,
When my-love-you ears hear I-love-you voice
And our separate days are done.

 I’ve been talking a lot with my cousin about a variety of things, but mostly about family and reunions and how hurricanes turn the skies to purple and the sea to azure and how it can nearly capsize a boat but when you hold tight to the rigging and breathe in the beauty of the storm there is a richness that life infuses into your senses that can barely be worded. But word them, she did, exquisitely.

“It is the sky that is so wonderful…purple, blue red, green—yes, even now at night—the wind sounds like haunting mysteries, the rain beats down like a mad man and then stops like one just to start again.”

I read her words and I wonder what it would be like if we all took time to step outside the ordinary and seek the deep, the descriptive, the breathtaking beauty God has woven into the fabric of our days that leave them anything but mundane. Do we dare?

What if we lived in poetry?

What if we remembered we were created by the most imaginative Creator of all, and that He infused us with His mystery, His beauty, His artistic revelation—and then took just a moment or two of our day to thank Him in an echo of His expression of us?

Don’t say you aren’t a poet. We all are. What do you long to express, communicate, describe? I invite you…you!…to think beyond the ordinary and dig deep for those words—the ones that will set your heart to racing and touch the deepest parts of your creative being—and pour it all out for His pleasure and yours and ours. Here. Somewhere.  Anywhere.

God deserves it. We all long for it. You will live richer for it.

Go on. Dare.

 

 

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