When I was a child, I loved poetry. I didn’t bring home books of poetry from the school library for the same reason I brought home horse books. I brought home Marguerite Henry’s Misty of Chincoteague because we had circle segments in reading wheels with spokes for various genres of reading; we were to color in boxes for all the spokes to become well-rounded readers. One box for King of the Wind was colored into the horse spoke, and another box for Danny Dunn and the Anti-Gravity Paint was colored into the science fiction spoke. To me, poetry seemed to be all the colors splashed on a canvas of words.

As I recall, the poetry books at my school library were quite limited, but I loved them all. The poetry went over my head. I did not grasp the word play in Eugene Field’s “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod,” even though the last stanza of the poem explicitly explained it, but I delighted in the picturesque wooden shoe that “sailed on a river of crystal light into a sea of dew.” I loved Walter de la Mare’s “Silver,” although, when I read the poem online a few minutes ago, I had to look up the definition of shoon. As a child, I had no idea what casements were, but I loved the cadence of “One by one the casements catch / Her beams beneath the silver thatch.” Poetry filled me with wonder and a desire to capture beauty in words. By the dim light that filtered into my bedroom from the hallway, I huddled under my covers and scribbled poems when I was supposed to be sleeping. 

As an adult, with meetings to attend and groceries to get, time for poetry fizzled out. In the midst of so much work, reading poetry felt like more work. Even Scripture’s poetry left me flat. I spent two years studying Psalms, praying to be changed by them as I have been transformed by other biblical books. I felt like the young Jane Eyre who, upon confessing to Mr. Brocklehurst that the Psalms were not interesting, was castigated: “That proves you have a wicked heart…” The Psalms did not begin to sing for me until I began to sing them. One reason to wrestle with poetry is that much of Scripture is poetic. Psalms also taught me to hold poems in one hand and biography in the other, a new habit that is also reawakening me to nonbiblical poetry. For poems are the bits of lives dressed up in ribbons. 

I never stopped writing poetry. I no longer cuddle under the covers with crayons, but poems sometimes haunt my sleepless nights until I shuffle out of bed to pin them down. I know my own poetry is pedestrian, as much as I want it to tango and waltz, but there are times when nothing else will do.

“Shekinah,” written for my second grade students, tries to capture, as in a net, what sometimes feels slippery: learning wisdom through wonder. It includes aspects of the second-grade curriculum at the Christ-centered classical school where I taught: weather and the water cycle; poetry; astronomy, studied in conjunction with ancient Greece; the elements, studied in conjunction with ancient Egypt. The poem served as my job description and shaped my prayers for our classroom days. 

שכינה

Give us sight,

slung wide as cirrus skies;

Glints as dew in sunlight rise.

Give us time, 

wrung sweet and lemon-lime;

Days like reels for catching rhyme.

Give us light,

strung out like starry lines;

Gold drawn up from deepest mines.

Give us life,

flung grace that lilts and flies;

Joy, God-gilt, to make us wise.

May the Living Word make your words “like apples of gold in a setting of silver” (Proverbs 25:11).