An Addendum to the RAP

On Friday at the High Calling Blogs, I had a post for the Random Acts of Poetry about “The Poems We Come From.” The prompt for the poems submitted was to name a poem that you had first read or experienced in high school or school (or anywhere else) that had had an impact on you, and then to write a poem about it.

And the poems came in. We had poems representing Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, William Shakespeare, John Milton, Langston Hughes, Anne Sexton, Luci Shaw – and even Johnny Cash. One poet even did a YouTube video of his poem, and another submitted the video of the Johnny Cash song that had inspired her. It was amazing.

We had to establish a deadline for the submissions, but another one came in (and yet another may still come in), and I offered to note it here.

Monica Sharman at Know-Love-Obey God wrote a moving story about the poem she selected. She was not the first of her family to go to college, but she was the first to live on campus, and the reason was that her parents had separated and sold the home she had lived in since kindergarten. She became part of a Bible study, and that led her to write a poem. And that is the poem she came from.

And this is from the new poem, entitled “Nothing,” she submitted:

He began the poem with a question,
“Who shall?”
and so I questioned, I wondered:
Indeed, who shall?
I began to read a list
of potential separators
and wondered,
which of these is the thing
that shall separate me,
that shall tear me
from God’s love?
Which of these?
The list continued
and, unsure, I worried.
The answer did not come
and did not come.
It was a long list…

Visit Monica’s place to read the whole story and the rest of the poem. And visit the High Calling Blogs to see all of the poems submitted.

Photograph: Tree in Fog at Night by Petr Kratochvil via Public Doman Pictures.