What Matters

The Northeast Kingdom Wednesday Poets meet
at the Barton Public Library May through October.

When I was in art school, 
the dean of my department 
asked me why I would write poetry?

The audience will be so small, 
she said. 

I didn’t deny her claim. 
I also didn't know what to say to her assertion. 
I kept writing, but short stories which, 
I wasn’t really any good at writing.

When I got back to painting 
(I had been in art school after all:-)), 
I expressed some deep longings of heart and soul
through journey drawings 
in pastel, craypas and oil stick! 
Their stories led me back to church. 
Not the Catholic church of my childhood 
but the Unitarian Universalist - a Protest faith!
Different but similar: 
a community of companions 
traveling together 
remembering the lessons 
we learned in kindergarten: 
hold hands as you cross busy streets 
and sometimes dangerous roads, 
as you bound up joyful hills 
and crawl the low valleys.

Eventually I discovered ministry
which led me back to writing
not poetry but
songs, curricula, prayers, 
sermons, eulogies, blessings 
and even prophetic invocations
(Once at the Malden Chamber of Commerce 
sponsored City Candidates Forum
I reminded the 7 a.m. breakfast crowd
a chaplain to the U.S. Senate looks out at the senators,
and prays not for them, but for the country!)
A small audience no doubt 
but capable of unfathomable reach 
in ripples and on air currents 
altered by pebbles and butterfly wings

we cannot know how
to save the world. (the world will be saved
other than one encounter at a time...)

These days I am happy 
to reach across an aisle to share 
a smile, a hug; 
to pass the peace with the people 
who call a sanctuary their spirit’s home; 
who practice loving one another
then love others we meet in the soup kitchen, 
at the march for black lives, 
in the prayer warriors meeting.

In the Barton Wednesday Poets group, 
I practice the craft that I began 
with my nine year old hands 
when I wrote my first poem about fog. 
It rhymed!
I pay close attention while Sylvia and Adrienne 
encourage eighteen disparate creatives
(Jeannie who speaks the word warm
with a roundness that only a native Vermonter can
and creates comfort with her voice and her eyes)
(Mark who truly saves lives as an EMT
...
to render our tender righteous hearts 
into free form, pantoum, or rhyming couplets;
to carve out 
a poem that one of us will submit 
eleven times until it wins first place 
in that distinguished journal out of Pennsylvania, 
or another poem that astonishes 
our sixty year old peer 
who dares call herself a poet 
as she becomes runner up 
in the St. Johnsbury winter slam!

How big is the audience? 
Anywhere from one 
- the poet herself - 
to an unknown many.

What matters, 
I think now, 
is that we wrote what we needed to say. 
And in the writing we came alive 
even to ourselves.

Did that make an impact?
Oh yeah!