Kingdom of words is valuable haven

The Lesson

I see him often now,

carrying empty washed pails,

his faded green jacket fitted

close to his collar,

brown-billed cap down,

half-hiding serious eyes.

It is cold out there, where

he walks, and November.

He passes out of sight, shows

from between red buildings,

opens barn doors, offering

steam to the chill. Laying his face

to Holstein's flank, he strips

milk from swollen teats, sings

comfort to his cows,

the child in the corner.

The barn is warm and deep

and full with smells.

He carries pails of sloshing milk,

calls the child to him, calls,

hurry, it's late, and I hang

on the back of his seat

in the old black car all the way,

all the way as he tells me birds

and I spell hawk, speak sky.

I grew up on an Iowa farm near a town much like our upstate villages. At 5, because the country school my older sister attended had fallen to consolidation, I was the first in our family to go to town school. A transportation system was not yet in place, so my dad, who was the first in his family to graduate from high school, but who loved words, drove us the five miles to school, passing the time by pointing out birds and teaching us their names. "Hawk" was the very first word I learned to spell.

At the auction after the rural school's closing, my parents brought home two bookcases stuffed with books, among them four children's anthologies called "Voices of Verse," published in 1943. I spent many hours with those little cloth-covered books, beginning with Book One, which opened easily in my child's hands, opening whole new worlds to me.

The very first poem in the book was Walter de la Mare's "The Huntsmen," and it was followed by Robert Lewis Stevenson's "At the Seaside," Christina Georgina Rossetti's "Who Has Seen the Wind," and many more, a total of 155 pages of poetry, each poem introduced with a brief explanation and followed by questions, primarily about content, but gently easing this young reader into an understanding of metaphor and simile, alliteration and personification without ever talking down to her. As soon as I could make out the words, I read those poems over and over, memorizing many of them, trying to answer the editors' questions, trying to understand, without knowing what I so badly wanted to know, what the poets were saying behind the words on the pages.

Words are the most common of commodities: we learn to read by first grade, we talk to each other all the time, we listen to the radio and watch TV, where talking heads give us the daily news with words; we study books, we tell each other our most intimate secrets with words. We think we know everything there is to know about language until we open a book and read a poem that answers a question we didn't know we had, or raises another question.

Poetry is that most special way of using words, language used in the highest way, the one place where every word in every line counts. A story or an essay or a novel may well be exciting and well-written, but a great poem can be that very story, deeply etched as if in stone; or it can take one, mundane moment and elevate it to the clouds. A day without poetry is not imaginable to me; I need that concision more than I need that first cup of coffee. A good poem helps me to clarify my own thinking by asking me to think.

Now I live in words. Not only am I blessed to work through Bright Hill Literary Center, but I teach poetry and creative writing to students throughout New York, working in huge schools with highly diverse populations and more than 40 languages in Queens, as well as in small schools with 20 graduating students in the Catskills. Leading workshops for teachers, for gifted and special needs students, for retarded adults and college students, and through the Empire State Poetry Connection distance learning project, I learn that most important of news, both from those students and from the authors I teach; it was in Carlos Drummond de Andrade's poem "Looking for Poetry" where I found the sentence, "Enter the kingdom of words as if you were deaf."

In February I was fortunate to be a judge for the National Endowment for the Arts Catskill Region Poetry Outloud Contest, where I heard students from throughout the area recite great poems from English literature with intensity and verve; and in May, Bright Hill will conduct its 13th annual Share the Words High-School Poetry Competition, where students recite their own poems.

The kingdom of words, written in poetic form, is a wonderful place to live, and April, National Poetry Month, is an ideal time to visit that kingdom, maybe even stay awhile.

Bertha Rogers is poet laureate of Delaware County and founder of Bright Hill Center in Treadwell.