When a Poem Hits Just Right

It is a perpetual delight that my job allows me to come in contact with poetry on a regular basis. 

While I've always taught poetry in some shape or form, it's really only been in the last few years that I've made a concerted effort to include even more poetry in my classroom, especially from poets who are alive. From elementary school through college, the vast majority of the poetry I was exposed to came from poets who were long dead. At the time, it seemed to me that writing poetry was something that people did in "the olden days." I want my students to see that poetry is alive and relevant to our world. 

We're currently in the midst of our March Madness Poetry Bracket, where each day two poems face off at the beginning of class, and the students vote to determine which one will advance to the next round. 

I selected which poems would be in the bracket last month, and they are all poems that I've read and enjoyed before, so none of them should come as a surprise to me.

And yet, yesterday, one of the poems struck me so deeply that I was surprised by my visceral reaction. It almost brought me to tears.

The poem is "The Peace of Wild Things" by Wendell Berry, and it was the first line that struck me as if I were hearing it for the first time:

                                             "When despair for the world grows in me..."

In the last couple months, it seems as if the bad and scary news stories are coming at a frantic pace. And I have been feeling that despair for the world that Berry names. However, he goes on to say that when this feeling keeps him up at night, he goes to the water and "come[s] into the peace of wild things / who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief." 

He goes on to say that for a short while he can "rest in the grace of the world" and be free. This was just the reminder that I needed, the perfect message that I didn't realize how much I needed to hear on a Wednesday morning in March.

When a poem reaches you like that, when it is just what you need to hear in the moment, it is a beautiful experience. It is the magic of poetry. It is a delight.