Jul 10, 2009

RAP: Make Me Human

L.L. here. Musing on how poetry has made me “more human.” In other words, it’s opened me, with the nice side benefit of improving my writing.

I think back to the way I used to write. Oh, I’ve been writing for over fifteen years—corporate newsletters, copy for baby wipes and car fresheners, direct mail promos for leather-bound book collections. When I couldn’t face another ad assignment, I quit that and ended up teaching, then speaking for a ministry on the side. But my writing still had a kind of inhuman quality, by which I mean it was without a deeper voice.

What I needed was poetry. Thank goodness I met a few good friends on-line who took me ‘round the corner on this one. Come on, Barkat, come and see. Poetry is exactly what you need.

Good poetry helps us get inside a moment, live it, taste it. And writing poetry is an exercise in humility, as it requires us to really listen to people, news, or, yes, even baby wipes. And when we’ve listened and written it down, then we listen again… to what the poem unexpectedly says to us and other people.

If we are clever like our featured poet Lorrie, we can listen so well that we sometimes hear the human qualities of an inanimate object. This is something we pretend, of course, but it drives us back to reality and our own humanity.

Lorrie’s Tambourine

Tambourine
black half moon and silver tongued
bring me your primitive story
tell how your voice praised Yahweh
tell how David danced with all his might

How about this, then… for next week’s prompt. Choose an object and make it human, the way Lorrie gave her tambourine human qualities. How will your object move, make sound? What will it tell you, or do? Post your offering by next Thursday and provide your link in my comment box.

ALL RAP PARTICIPANTS:
LL’s Gift
Lorrie’s Tambourine
Monica’s Wedding Gown
Liz’s Gone
Simple Country Girl’s Wild Daisy
Jim’s Take Jonah, many do
Mom2Six’s Cavern
Laura’s Paint
Joelle's Animals Know Better