Messengers
Shirley McPhillips
I believe Ezra Pound when he said that "Literature is news that stays news," but we don't often get to hear our poets bring the news. When we do, we're apt to be informed in surprising ways.
Recently, I watched Bill Moyers interview poet Robert Bly who recalled flying to Iran a few months ago to the grave of the 14th-century Persian poet Hafez whose poems he has translated. He was charmed to see groups of children arriving early in the morning. "And they stood around the little tomb and sang a poem of Hafez's." They went away and more children came.
Bly wondered why we don't do that. Why we don't go to the grave of, say, Walt Whitman and have children come there? If we did, he thought, "then we would bring the poets into the heart instead of having them in our heads in graduate school." When we bring children in and they "get associated with the heart when they're very small, they can feel it all through their lives." News that stays news.
As a staff developer working with teachers and administrators, often I begin or end a conversation with an adult poem, something for us to take in, to ponder; something to remind us that our lives need nurturing. Bly reminds me that the Iran we hear about in the news is not the whole of the news from that part of the world. We have much to learn.
And sometimes we write. We do this to remind ourselves that the fuel for poetry is all around us when we pay attention and let things catch us. That our poems can bring the news. I wrote "Messengers" days after seeing the Moyers/Bly interview. The line ". . . get associated with the heart" speaks to me about what matters in our work with students. It reminds me that, as a teacher, I hope to affect something, to affect someone, inside and out, so that hearts exchanging messages will pass them on, like poets, leaving indelible trails.
Messengers
There is a country
where children kneel
at the graves of lost poets.
In the morning they come
to the tomb of Hafez
and sing his poems back to him.
In this way, they get associated
with the heart early on,
breathing in messages.
The pull and tear
as the outside world stirs
the linings of some inside sky,
growing orbits of fuel
and fire, outvoicing words,
they become messengers
to the world.
by Shirley McPhillips
Shirley McPhillips is the online poet laureate for Choice Literacy. She is the author (with Nick Flynn) of A Note Slipped Under the Door: Teaching from Poems We Love .
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Jennifer Allen
