Last Friday I sat down in our hotel room and started writing
on a poem while my partner napped. It’s my first poem, if you don’t count the
haiku I have been writing for the last couple years or so. The whole poetry
thing has been growing in me for quite some time. It has seemed strange to me
that poetry would start calling to me as it is something I have always
struggled to get. In my college literature class I breezed through fiction and
drama but I really had to work at poetry and I still didn’t think I got it.
But it’s been calling to me, to which my bookshelves can
testify. Mostly, I’ve dabbled in reading it or about it but I hadn’t attempted
to write anything.
Until Friday. So I wrote without much attention to where it
was going. I wrote until what was in me to write seemed written and I stopped
and moved on to other things.
Saturday we spent the day with the German student we had
hosted a couple years back. We went to the Cleveland Museum of Art (consider
this a recommendation). Later we drove him and another on his delegation to the
airport. Sunday morning we headed home.
Sunday evening, after I had unpacked and started some
laundry I looked at the poem again.
O.M.G. The poem had a theme that I hadn’t intended and hadn’t
seen before. I didn’t so much write the poem as it wrote itself to me. The
experience has been deeply spiritual. I know on some level that poetry
is/should be spiritual but it really wasn’t my intent when I started writing.
Like Jacob, God was in this place and I didn’t know it. I’m
left with this even stronger sense that the Presence is always with us… if we
can find a way to step aside and let it show itself to us. I don’t feel I’m
especially good at recognizing God in the moment so I feel very much like Jacob
when I look back on my day—or a poem I have written—and surprised to see that
God was there and I didn’t know it.
