Everyone a Poet

One day the Maker in glad triumph will make all good come true. Then we will all be poets.

Everyone is a poet. Even the talking on paper that throws in a few rhymes, meter forgot, all contrived and construed and given a moniker. “Want to hear my poem?”

At the other end of the spectrum are Shakespeare and many others, and it is good to know truth and beauty exist to spur us on, to give us that reach exceeding grasp.

But I was saying we are all poets for we all live, and the dullest among us wonder what it means. We find ourselves singing even if mute, running though lame, yearning though bound. The human heart is more than blood and muscle: it is an otherworldly something that will not die entire. Poetry is one of its voices.

This is strange because most of us struggle to write a sentence that gives our heart full voice. Yet it is there whether we write it or not. Writing is secondary to logos, to heart, to mind. Maybe even secondary to being human, though that is hard to conceive because the two seem hopelessly intertwined. After Creation, Adam wanted to write, I am thinking. He wanted to tell the story in a way others could read. But papyrus was not a thing, though cave walls were coming.

Speaking may be better. Writing may be an artifice, an artificial coinage, counterfeit because added, lacking voice, inflection, face, touch, person.

Now we write with machines – “time-saving” we say, on a long list of benefits. Carmudgeons refuse. They keep the touch and feel of pencil on paper, leaving the buzzing machines for those who know the machines are better without really knowing what or why.

Be as it may, on this good morning I attempt a poem, for the wild and urgent beauty of life falls on me, calls me, shocks me, fills me, overwhelms. There is nothing here except everything, and One day the Maker in glad triumph will make all good come true. Then we will all be poets. Though some plain and pedestrian, all beautiful: “Knowing as we are known,” seeing with vision clear and whole.

It is the beatific vision and my longing leaves the world of words behind.