Cross-Training Body Mind Emotions Spirit | Rachael R. Resch

April is National Poetry Month, and today, April 29th, is Poem In Your Pocket Day.  In honor of this, each student chose a poem at random from the basket.  Our focus for class was the cross-pollination of the first line of each person’s poem, read aloud:

Wage peace with your breath.
The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day
runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures.

He who binds to himself a joy . . .
When my friend is away from me, I am depressed.
Nothing in the day light delights me.

Before this longing,
If you don’t know the kind of person I am,
Sigh deeply!  Remember how great this is!  Go on a wild date!
Be instantly on a fabulous adventure.

If you don’t know the kind of person I am,
It’s time to put up a love-swing.
Fall-madly-in-love day.
Sigh deeply!  Remember how great this is!  Go on a wild date!

Thank you to our poets, Judyth Hill, Rabindranath Tagore, William Blake, Kabir, Theodore Roethke and William Stafford.

You can read each poem in it’s entirety — as well the poems no one ended up choosing today by Rainer Maria Rilke, Naomi Shihab Nye, David White, Mary Oliver, Kabir, David Wagoner and Nanao Sakaki — at Poem of The Week.

Feel the poem  of your body, all 75 trillion cells a mysterious, hybrid, multi-lingual, amalgamated poetry jam.  Each cell speaks its own line, its own word, its own sound, its own vibration, its own name.  Listen to the poem of your body, the poem given to you by the holy which is your life.  Be that poem.

The Tzutzujil Maya people say that the spirits are constantly speaking this world into being.  Every blade of grass, every floor board, every piece of plastic, every bird, wind and our lunch is being sung and spoken into life by the holy.  The Torah says the same thing: there’s an angel that speaks each being into life.

So this world is really one great cacaphonous poem, a strange and beautiful hybrid poem, or perhaps the world is an infinite multitude of poems all being said simultaneously like a great gaggle of geese all talking at once.