I’ve been writing about poetry lately, which has come as a bit of a surprise to me. I’m not sure I’ve ever done that before. But I’m a school librarian, and we celebrated poetry all last month in a big way at the middle/high school in my district.
April is National Poetry Month, and I was inspired.
I dubbed one of my activities “Random Acts of Poetry.” I printed out a dozen or so copies of some of my favorite poems: Langston Hughes’ “Dreams;” Emily Dickinson’s “Hope is the Thing with Feathers,” Carl Sandburg’s “Fog” and William Carlos Williams’ “Red Wheelbarrow.” They are small poems, and I piled them into a plastic basket.
Armed with special blue tape that’s not supposed to tear paint off the walls when it’s removed, I set forth to leave my poems in unlikely spots. This included the office water dispenser, vending machines in the food court, the entrance to the gym and various teachers’ doors. A colleague saw me and took some poems. I know she placed one on the statue of our school’s founder (he's holding a book) and another on the mirror of the restroom in the middle school wing.
I found that distributing poetry in this way filled my heart with joy. That doesn’t happen so much lately. I despair at the state of the world; I feel our president is destroying our nation and we are destroying our natural environment. We have students in our district who are Syrian refugees. I want to cry when I hear news reports on what is happening in that country. Our society seems to be turning more uncivil every day. Violence is rampant.
The simple act of sticking a poem on a door won’t solve anything. But as I committed my Random Acts of Poetry, I was reminded of a photo of a protester holding up a flower in front of a line of armed soldiers during the March on the Pentagon in 1967. Sometimes you just have to say “peace” when everyone else is saying “war.”
Sometimes you just have to distribute poems because so many others are spreading lies and vitriol.
Along the way, I spotted another colleague. We exchanged pleasantries and I offered her a poem. It was “Dreams.” She thanked me and went on her way.
Back in the library, the excitement was building. One team of eighth-graders was making book spine poetry. (I wrote about this recently when the other team did it. The students make a poem by piling books on top of one another; the titles form the poem.) The other team was coming in for “Poem in Your Pocket Day.”
They would select a short poem from the paper pockets arrayed on a bulletin board, or from a basket filled with snippets of verse. The idea is to keep the poem with you all day, or share it with a friend. They would be sharing with their peers once they got back to the classroom.
In the midst of all this, a colleague came in and said to me, with fake indignation, “Oh, so you put the poem about purple cows on the fat guy’s door!”
I had. It was Ogden Nash at his silliest: “I never saw a Purple Cow/I never hope to see one/But I can tell you, anyhow/I’d rather see than be one.
I love that poem!
Anyway, my colleague is not fat. I wouldn’t even call him chubby. I said, with all the dignity I could muster, “I put it on your door because you have a sense of humor. You’re whimsical!”
With that line, I could tell that I had been hanging around poetry a little too much. We did have a good laugh, though.
I was sad to see National Poetry Month end, even though May is one of my favorite months. Then, T, the colleague I’d given the “Dreams” poem to, came into the library with a student. I was in my office, which adjoins the library workroom. T’s student had a work assignment to do some light cleaning for the library and they were gathering their supplies. A library staffer also was in the workroom, and I heard my name mentioned.
Curious, I stuck my head around the door. “Oh, there you are,” T said cheerfully. She proceeded to tell me that on the day I’d given her the poem, she’d gone home and written a birthday card to a friend who lives in the mid-Atlantic region. This friend had endured a hard life, but had managed to pull things together and became a counselor.
After she wrote her sentiments, T thought of the poem, and how it related to her friend’s life.
“Hold fast to dreams/For if dreams die/Life is a broken-winged bird/That cannot fly.
Hold fast to dreams/For when dreams go/Life is a barren field/Frozen with snow.”
She took the poem and attached it to magnetic paper, thus turning it into a magnet, and sent it to her friend.
I didn’t need to know how or even if the friend reacted. I had handed out a poem, and it was headed south, to commemorate someone’s birthday. Someone I didn’t even know.
When we do random acts of kindness, or poetry, we don’t know if they’ll have any effect. That’s part of the joy of doing them. We scatter our seeds into the wind. But isn’t it wonderful when we see something bloom?
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