Poetry

I have experienced first hand how people connect to different books. You can always seem to find a connection in just about any book you read. Whether it’s feeling like a doll like Ella, not knowing who you are like Alice, or not wanting to grow up like Peter Pan, you can find a way to connect to a book. One type of text that I haven’t really thought about before until here recently is poetry. Growing up I hated poetry, my teachers made us write poems and I hated it, hated it, hated it. This semester one of my professors made us bring our favorite poem to class and I was like, “I don’t like poetry, I don’t have a favorite poem.” Then I went looking through some of my old stuff and I had a box of stuff from my “first love.” He passed away when I was fifteen and at his funeral there was this poem read. After the funeral they typed it up and passed it around as an email and I had printed it out. While I was reading through the yellowed papers I realized, duh, I love this poem. I don’t know the name of it, nor the author, but this is what it was:
If tears could build a stairway,
And memories a bridge,
I’d walk right up to heaven,
To bring you home again…
No farewell words were spoken,
No time to say goodbye,
You were gone before I knew it,
And only God knows why…
Our hearts still ache in sadness,
And secret tears still flow…
What it meant to lose you,
No one will ever know…
Because without your smile or laugh,
Life is too hard to carry on…
-unknown
This experience has made me realize that you can connect to poetry just like you can connect to a novel. I hope that as a future teacher, I can instill in my students a love for poetry, not a hatred that I had towards it. And now I will always remember this poem, this poem that described how I felt the day we buried Clayton Lee Koehne and the poem that describes how I still feel today.