At the tender age of 10, I wrote my first poem. It was a truly terrible one. It started off with these words, “I heard the coyotes howling one night. Howling to the moon so bright.” It went on to say something like the coyotes howled like this at the moon before any white men stepped foot in America, and I think it also said something about coyotes howling at the same star that the wise men followed. I am not sure how the star and the moon connect. Like I said, it was a terrible poem.
However, ten-year-olds can be excused for writing terrible poems. I remember I wrote it after waking up one night and hearing the coyotes howling. Hearing the eerie, lonesome sound, I lay there, moved by a longing I could not express. Why were they howling? What did they know that I didn’t know? Why did it move me so much? I needed to express what I felt and so I tried to write a poem about it. I think now what I wanted to say in the poem was that the coyotes knew of things that we didn’t, that they had howled long before I was born, and how it felt like they were steeped in some kind of ancient knowledge that I had no idea of.
As a child and also as an adult, I struggled with the way that beauty hurt. Why did a beautiful sunset dying over greening wheat fields pain me so much? How could a few words from a poem stir me with longing for something I never knew? Why did the stark beauty of November prairie grass framed by barren Osage orange trees haunt me with its images?
Ten years ago, when I was putting together my first book of poetry, Echoes of Eternity, Beulah Nisly kindly let me use her beautiful photos for the book. Beulah is my mom’s spontaneous yet thoughtful cousin, and a lover of beauty. Beulah loves to capture this beauty with her camera, and I first met her when we got together to discuss the photos for the book. After reading through my poetry, she suggested that I read C.S. Lewis’s “The Weight of Glory” and even printed it off for me to read.
I did and my heart leaped for joy when I read this:
The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited. (C.S Lewis, the Weight of Glory)
That, I thought, “the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never visited”, that was why it hurts so much. It hurts because I can’t get enough of it. I can’t hang on to it. It is only the echo, the scent, the news that reminds me of that “something else” that waits for me.
That is why a road curving into the distance beckons my heart, why the moon rising on an October night over cornfields hurts me, why being alone on a misty mountaintop makes me cry, why rain falling on a gray day brings gives me a deep, delicious sadness, why the sound of the freight train mourning through the night makes me shiver with sadness and joy at the same time, why the words, “The eternal God is thy refuge and underneath are the everlasting arms,” resonates deep within me, why I listen to sad songs like Fernando Ortego’s “Now That You’re Gone,” or lonesome Chinese flute music or Gregorian chants of the Psalms or ancient Jewish songs. It reminds me of a place that I am going to, somewhere that I have not visited and yet somehow I carry the memory of that place imprinted on my soul.
Because of this, I was eager to read Bittersweet by Susan Cain after waiting for the book for months. Cain put even more words and clarity to what C.S Lewis began to explain for me. She talks about melancholy, longing or the “bittersweet,” how it calls to us, and how the desire it stirs up in us is a desire for the divine, even though she insists she is agnostic. She talks of embracing pain and an imperfect world, in order to find healing. She also discusses how sadness or pain triggers compassion and empathy for others, and how closeness to death makes us realize what truly important.
Cain writes, “We think we long for eternal life, but maybe what we’re really longing for is perfect and unconditional love; a world in which lions actually do lay down with lambs; a world free of famines and floods, concentration camps and Gulag archipelagos; a world in which we grow up to love others in the same helplessly exuberant way we once loved our parents; a world in which we’re forever adored like a precious baby…” This was in response to RAADfest, an event focused on anti-aging, radical life extension and physical mortality in which people who are determined not to die gather together for a seminar on advice on how not to do so, or that is the vibe I got from what Cain said. These people believe that if death were eradicated, then the inner selfish desires that drive us to survival would fade away as well, and humanity could be united. Cain writes, “And I believe exactly the opposite: that sorrow, longing, and maybe even mortality itself are a unifying force, a pathway to love; and that our greatest and most difficult task is learning how to walk it.” Cain argues that the fullest life is experienced when we embrace both pain and joy, death and life at the same time.
Cain also talks how we sometimes carry the pain of the generations past and how studies show pain from our ancestors can affect the way we are wired. I have often wondered about this, if some of the heaviness I feel at times is my own or from others. She talks about her own loss, how her relationship with her mother disintegrated as a teenager, and talks about dealing with loss and grief.
There is more, much more, to the book and I recommend it. I wanted to read it slowly and savor it, but I had it on a 2 week loan from Libby at a time when work and study and life clashed, and I had to read it in gulps. I don’t agree with everything Cain says, but it helped me become more aware of myself and that longing, and realize that much of my own poetry, especially anything printed in the “Heartsong” section of my book Dustbeams comes from that innate longing, that melancholy bittersweetness that Cain talks about. And perhaps why I even write poetry in the first place.
“All the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumor…” of that that source of the longing that we feel (C.S Lewis, the Weight of Glory), the glory that Cain simply called the divine, and I call God. The writers of the Psalms felt it too in their laments of pain and songs of joy, and John when he penned the words, “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.”
William Herbert Carruth wrote a poem called “Each in His Own Tongue”, which I discovered years ago and memorized a part. Some of the verses may be a bit controversial, but here are the ones I consider the best, and that rightly say what I am trying to say.
A haze on the far horizon, The infinite, tender sky, The ripe, rich tint of the cornfields, And the wild geese sailing high; And all over upland and lowland The charm of the goldenrod — Some of us call it Autumn, And others call it God.
Like tides on a crescent sea beach, When the moon is new and thin, Into our hearts high yearnings Come welling and surging in; Come from the mystic ocean, Whose rim no foot has trod — Some of us call it Longing, And others call it God.
I think that the Preacher says it best of all,
“He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.” Ecclesiastes 3:11
Tonight, I was reading a few lines of Sara Teasdale’s in her volume of poems, Flame and Shadow. Her poems are always alight with vivid imagery, often of nature, and the few lines I read tonightabout night falling made me terribly homesick. Homesick for dusk at home, twilight in early soft June summers, or wintry landscapes and sunsets on snow.
Which in turn, both homesickness and poetry about the later parts of the day, made me think of a poem that I wrote when I was 17. This poem is not like Sara Teasdale’s poems in any way, but it always stirs a warm memory inside of me of late winter nights and a memory of my favorite thing to do as a child on those late winter nights: read in bed late into the night. (Come to think of it, it is one of my favorite things to do as an adult.)
The worst thing about reading in bed late at night was the fact that I did not have a lamp beside my bed. Why not, I am not sure, because I remember one year most of us got lamps for a Christmas present, but at the time I wrote this poem I lacked a lamp.
This meant that someone had to get out of bed and turn off the light before it was possible to go to sleep.
Now, when you turn off the light as soon as you get up the stairs and then crawl into bed, there is no drama involved at all. But if you have been reading for hours, engrossed in your book in which you have just finished off the story of Sherlock Holmes and the Hound of the Baskervilles, or perhaps White Fang, or The Prophet, or At the End of the Spear, it is impossible for a young (or old) person with a fertile imagination to turn off the light in an ordinary fashion. For one, someone might have sneaked in under the bed while you were busy reading. Or, something, who knows what, might be waiting out there in the hall just as you reach the light switch…. really so many things could go wrong.
If my sister and I were sleeping in the same bed, then an argument would follow about who should turn off the light, and it usually turned out that the one sleeping closest to the light switch would turn it off, if nothing else for personal safety reasons since having the other person do it would mean that person could easily land on you on the expedited return trip.
But it was worse when you were sleeping by yourself. There was no moral support or expectation of a warm, living human being lying in the bed when you returned from the turning-off-of-the-light. All the worse if there would be.
A friend of my mom’s who used to live in Kansas recently reached out to me after coming across my blog. One of the questions she asked was about my journey in coming to Thailand, as well as my journey in writing poetry. I had already been tossing ideas about in my mind in relation to writing about the latter topic, and her suggestion got my mind rolling. What exactIy got me started writing poetry, or writing in general? It’s hard to say. Books, events, people, words of encouragement, God… all these things. Perhaps explaining in depth about all the details of what poetry means to me and how I began writing poetry would sort of be like taking all the beauty and mystery out of the story, like Carl Sandburg said. He said, “Roses, sunsets, faces have mystery. If we could explain them, then after having delivered our explanations we could say, ‘Take it from me, that’s all there is to it, and there’s no use your going any further for I’ve told you all there is and there isn’t any more.’ If poems could be explained, then poets would have to leave out roses, sunset, and faces…” Perhaps if every detail of our journey could be explained then it would lose its mystery. All that to say, here are a few bits and pieces of the journey.
In the first grade, I published my first essay. Miss Denise told me to write about our hobbies as a contribution to the school newspaper. Not only were we supposed to write about our hobbies, but we were to write why we liked to do them.
Mine went like this:
I like to bike.
I like to eat.
I like to sleep.
I like to bike because I like to.
I like to eat because I get hungry very fast.
I like to sleep because then I don’t have to work.
Brutally honest and to the point. (Some of my editors probably wish I would practice some of that “to the pointness” again.)
In the second grade, I got in trouble with my teacher, who happened to be my cousin as well. I didn’t hear my class of 3 called to the table for our lesson, because I happened to be happily lost in a book, probably something like Dan Frontier or the Mr. T.W. Anthony Woo, or (shudder) the Hardy Boys.
I had to stay in at recess and put my head on my desk as a punishment.
In the third grade, I wrote a story. It was read aloud to the class and published in the school newspaper. It was of slightly better quality than my first-grade venture and was something about a boy who went on a hunt with his uncle.
In the fourth grade I got a new teacher. To the embarrassment of my older siblings, I again had hearing problems when I was lost in a book. Mr. Wes was slightly more understanding than the other teacher. Instead of punishing me, he came to my desk and got my attention. That was the year we had the new history books with the colorful, fascinating pictures of the American History. The history books were the frame for the historical fiction and the autobiographies that were donated to the school and devoured by my classmates and I.
In the 5th grade, my teacher set aside a class period each week for Creative Writing. During this time, we did all sorts of writing exercises, including one about a dinosaur wearing pink pajamas. We wrote descriptive paragraphs and stories and got feedback on our writing. The word counts of our stories rose along with the lists of ideas in our stories. Where at first 500 words had seemed insurmountable, we now found that it wasn’t enough to say what we wanted to say. The most popular topics were stories of the Underground Railroad and runaway slaves. My brother’s stories usually included either cattle rustlers or American Indians or cops and robbers or detectives or all of the above.
In the 6th grade, I started to care about my grades and began to pour myself into school. I especially looked forward to the Creative Writing each week. Close to the end of the year, we entered some of our stories into the local library’s writing contest and I was dumbfounded when the librarian called and said that I had won second prize for my age group.
7th grade brought Rainbow Writing. Finally, I was away from Climbing to Good English and diagramming long, dry sentences and labeling adjectives and adverbs, and instead, let loose on creative assignments. We formed groups with the 8th graders and had Peer Editing Conferences. I struggled emotionally that year and found that writing could help me release and process. I think that was the year that we started being penpals with students from Sterling College. My pen pal was Rachel Wise, and I adored her. I found an outlet in writing to her, and to this day wish I could see those letters again. I started writing some poetry and was introduced to the names and work of some of the great American poets like Emily Dickinson and Edgar Allan Poe when I wrote a research paper on American Literature. Emily of New Moon and the Chronicles of Narnia became favorites of mine and influenced these early years of writing. That year I penned a poem called “Echo Dreams,” which was published anonymously in the school newspaper.
8th grade brought the Lively Art of Writing by Lucille Payne. I loved everything about that book. October also found my class of three sitting in John Mast’s living room. The first day I found out that we were going to write a book compiling his stories, I lay down on my mattress and tried to soak it in. It seemed unbelievable to a 13 year old. That year we read through the A Beka Themes in Literature book, and the poetry in that book came alive for me like never before. Poems like, The Charge of the Light Brigade, and Longfellow’s The Day is Done are some of my favorites.
Life in the 8th grade was less tumultuous than 7th grade. It was full of promise and hope and I was incredibly sad when it ended. 8th grade marked the last of my school career (at that point) but I wasn’t ready for it to stop. I seriously imagined refusing to take my diploma on graduation day. (But then again, I imagined a wide variety of things).
After I left school at the age of 13, life was no longer marked in grades, but in years. 14 and 15 found me at home, mostly milking cows and memorizing lists of cow genealogies and sire attributes and the names, birthdates, and histories of every single cow. Without school, my brain had a lot of thinking space and needed something to stay busy. Thankfully, cows were interesting to me or I cringe to think of what else I would have swallowed up had I access to other things. I started to read through our set of encyclopedias but only made it to page 76 of the A book. I dreamed of writing a book and wrote out some plots but I rarely made it past the hatching stage of the story. Poetry was easier since you could do it in small amounts and then come back and rework it. Also, I am bad at grammar, and poetry gave me more poetic license than prose.
Around the age of 14 and 15, I began reading my Bible daily, especially books like Job and Isaiah and the Psalms in the KJV. The Word slowly began to influence my life more and more, and I would read it for the beauty of the words. Who wouldn’t fall in love with words like this? “And he hath made my mouth like a sharp sword; in the shadow of his hand hath he hid me, and made me a polished shaft; in his quiver hath he hid me.” (Isaiah 49:2 KJV)
16 was the year I could finally join the youth group at church and have a social life. It brought a lot of growing pains and secret crushes and joy and heartache. I began reading and writing more poetry as a way of expression. Shortly after my 16th birthday I discovered Tennyson’s “Sweet and Low” and would recite parts of that and the “Charge of the Light Brigade” to my horse as I rode down miles of outback roads that summer. Like the verses in the Bible that I had discovered, I fell in love with the simple uncluttered rhythm and beauty of “Sweet and Low.”
Sweet and low, sweet and low, Wind of the western sea, Low, low, breathe and blow, Wind of the western sea! Over the rolling waters go, Come from the dying moon, and blow, Blow him again to me; While my little one, while my pretty one, sleeps.
While outsiders view Kansas as one of the most boring states in the USA, many Kansans are proud and appreciative of the unique beauty of their state. Whether it’s the seas of golden wheat, or the burnt orange and browns of the CRP, or the barren beauty of winter or the wind that Kansas was named after, I found my surroundings a goldmine for inspiration for poetry. Capturing the spirit of the prairie almost became an obsession at times. At 16 I penned “Dust and Wind.”
Wind, wind, endless wind
Fleeting o’er the fields
Dancing in, flying in,
One long roaring wave.
Roaring wave of dust and wind,
Of dust and wind,
Of dust and wind.
Whirlwind of the land
In one unceasing blow
Sweeping lanes and in each hand
One unending broom
Unending broom of dust and wind
Of dust and wind
Of dust and wind
Wind, wind, blowing wild
And talking to me now
Talking to its lonely child
Daughter of the wind
Daughter of the dust and wind,
Of dust and wind
Of dust and wind
I felt deeply, and still do, about death. The death of relatives, people from our church, and the parents of friends hit me hard. In 2011, I wrote this poem after a friend’s father was killed in a tractor accident, and another friend’s mom passed away after being attacked by a bull.
No Words
She’s gone
Like a fragment from a weaving torn
Leaving you who have felt the sorrow born
Through ripping, tearing pain
And we grasp for words that are old and worn
And suddenly seem vain
I have no words.
They fail me when I see the sorrow
The endless aching of tomorrow
Stretched out over the years
I have no words that I can borrow
Only tears.
When I started teaching part time at the age of 20, I felt like I had found my happy space. My only disappointment was when my students weren’t always as excited as I was about the writing projects I assigned. As I taught English, I also began to get much better at it myself. That Christmas I read Jesse Stuarts The Thread that Runs so True for the first time. At 21, I had the opportunity to go to Faith Builders for summer term. As I had written about in this post here, I sat in on Jonas Sauder’s Poetry Appreciation class, which was the first time I really had a lot of interaction with other people who knew and loved and wrote poetry more than I did. It was there that while homesick, I wrote the poem, “Harvest Song.”
Harvest Song
And I must go down to the fields again
Through the shimmer of summer heat,
And walk through the waves of deepening gold
The oceans of ripening wheat;
Then I’ll stand on the edge where the grass still grows
Green by the amber shore,
And feast my eyes with a fierce wild joy
For the harvest is once more.
And I must go to where the sky is pinned
To the earth like an up-turned bowl
Where the hot wind sighs its searing breath
Against my face, and I’ll feed my soul
By the wide expanse of dying wheat
That moves and ripples and flies
And sings the song of my native blood
Harvest beneath the Kansas skies.
The next year at school, I did a poetry week with my students. At the end, I let the students choose a poem to recite at our program on the last day of school. It was interesting to see how each student chose a poem that seemed to fit their personality. Davy chose “The Turkey Shot Out of the Oven” (Jack Prelutsky), humorous and well-written. Micah stood at the front of the audience and recited innocently and soberly while his stick-out ears and wayward hair belied his innocence,
I did not eat your ice cream
I did not swipe your socks.
I did not stuff your lunch box
With rubber bands and rocks
I did not hide your sweater
I did not dent your bike
It must have been my sister
We look a lot alike
(I Did not Eat Your Ice Cream, Jack Prelutsky)
Javin read “Little Brown Pony” with a bridle in hand. And Jessamy in first grade recited,
The fog comes
on little cat feet
It sits looking over harbor and city
on silent haunches
And then moves on.
(Fog, by Carl Sandburg).
I started talking with friends about the possibility of publishing a book of poems. I had seen some compilations that sparked the idea, and after a few years of thinking about it, self-published a book of poems called Echoes of Eternity. Beulah Nisly, my mom’s cousin, agreed to donate her photography to the book. I have sweet memories of the fall of 2012, selecting the photos and discussing poetry. Her photos were exquisite and evocative. She captured Kansas in such a way that sometimes it felt like it would be better to leave the poem out.
The book came out in the spring of 2013, just a week or so before I traveled to Thailand the first time. Bad timing. Could I do it over again, I would do many things differently. One of those things would be finding someone to edit it more critically, but I had few of those kinds of mentors to turn to.
After moving to Thailand in 2014, I kept on writing, but perhaps more sporadically. During my college years I struggled with writing academically because I felt encased in rules and regulations. I hated it. College and living in another culture took a lot of brain energy, so there were times when I wrote little poetry. In December of 2019, however, I compiled a “tradebook” of poems, which was much less ambitious than my first venture, (I had more sense and less money) but with better quality poetry. This I titled, Through a Glass Darkly.
There you are, a taste of where and why and how I came to write poetry. I think I used to write poetry as a young girl because I loved the cadence and the imagery and the thrill of being able to take an event or a feeling and express it in words that touched my own heart. As I grew older, I wrote it more prayerfully. These days in addition to that, I find myself writing poetry as a way of reaching out to God in the empty and lonely spaces of my life. It’s a way that I can pray without really even knowing what I am praying for. Sometimes after I have written it out, I can finally understand what I really was feeling. And often only then feel relief.
Even after writing this, I find myself hesitating to publish it because it feels like when people write something like this, they write from the viewpoint of someone who has already arrived. I don’t think a poet ever quite arrives. And even as I write that, I realize I also hesitate to call myself a poet. But now, after throwing all political correctness and sensitive conscience to the wind, I will publish it. This is simply the story of an ordinary person who loves words.
The poem below was written in January 2009 at the age of 18. Or that’s the date I have on it, but I think I actually wrote the first draft a few months earlier in August of 2008. Recently, I opened up a copy of Echoes of Eternity, the first book of poems I published. I realized that few of my poems in that book had ever been published on my blog. Even though I feel like some of them fall below par (and I cringe when I see that), I also realize that there are some really good ones in the book. Also, there are a few that never really were good friends with me (for instance, they never seemed to quite say what I wanted them to say, or sound like I wanted them to sound) but when I returned to read them years later, I find that they are much better friends than I ever thought them to be. Below is one of those, called “Home,” mostly because ever since I left the village, homesickness has been harder.
I had 4 exams this week. Some really stressful and some not so stressful and some that I made more stressful than I should have. Today after my last exam I crashed in the living room, slept for 2 hours and dreamt strange dreams of the randomest people coming to see me and friends at Payap getting lost, and then getting found again. I then woke up long enough to zombie my way to my dentist appointment, barely able to even enjoy the fact that the sky was the bluest I had seen in months, and that the rain of the past few days had cleared off all the smog and the mountain was entirely visible. After my appointment and some lunch, I zombied back home where I spent the afternoon sprawled on the couch, trying to revive myself. And not succeeding.
Down deep beneath the fog somewhere is a feeling of satisfaction and victory. I can’t really feel it now, but it’s there. And sometimes I just want to cry.
I kept on thinking thinking today that I felt rather top heavy. That if I moved around too fast or if someone would poke me with a pin, random information would leak out, like what the Chinese character for “mian bao” is, or what the definition is of “brand equity.” (In case you’re wondering, Chinese and Marketing are not a part of my major, but a GE course and a free elective I took this spring. My major is English Communications.)
I still have a final paper to submit next week, and a few other projects that need to be wrapped up. But tomorrow I am heading to the mountains to dip my feet in a quick-rushing stream while I sip on some hot tea or coffee. And think about absolutely nothing.
And then in about a week, I’m off for home for the summer. Home, where in a little over a month the fields will be yellow with waves of wheat and combines will be droning in the distance late at night and Chinese and Marketing exams are far, far away.
Which makes me think of this poem:
Harvest Song
And I must go down to the fields again
Through the shimmer of summer heat,
And walk through the waves of deepening gold
The oceans of ripening wheat;
Then I’ll stand on the edge where the grass still grows
Green by the amber shore,
And feast my eyes with a fierce wild joy
For the harvest is once more.
And I must go to where the sky is pinned
To the earth like an up-turned bowl
Where the hot wind sighs its searing breath
Against my face, and I’ll feed my soul
By the wide expanse of dying wheat
That moves and ripples and flies
And sings the song of my native blood
Harvest beneath the Kansas skies.*
Soon I’ll be there. I can’t wait.
But for now I am grateful. Grateful for a family to go home to, and grateful for friends here who have blessed me and stood beside me, and grateful for the way God has blessed me tangibly in the last few weeks, whether in ways big or small.
insearchofabrook 