Memorizing Poetry

to light my path

I don’t know when it was exactly that I thought memorizing poems would be a good idea. It may have been when I studied W.S. Merwin in graduate school. I read his poem Come Back when my father was dying, and repeatedly after he was gone.

You came back to us in a dream and we were not here
In a light dress laughing you ran down the slope
To the door
And knocked for a long time thinking it strange

Oh come back we were watching all the time
With the delight choking us and the piled
Grief scrambling like guilt to leave us
At the sight of you
Looking well
And besides our questions our news
All of it paralyzed until you were gone

Is it the same way there

Photo by Nazrin Babashova

I’m sure the idea came to me again when I read The Sun by Mary Oliver, reminding me not to lose myself in the corporate world, to open my eyes on my commute, to witness mountain ranges that surrounded me, the sky and sun.

Have you ever seen
anything
in your life
more wonderful
than the way the sun,
every evening,
relaxed and easy,
floats toward the horizon
and into the clouds or the hills,
or the rumpled sea,
and is gone–
and how it slides again
out of the blackness,
every morning,
on the other side of the world,
like a red flower
streaming upward on its heavenly oils,
say, on a morning in early summer,
at its perfect imperial distance–
and have you ever felt for anything
such wild love–
do you think there is anywhere, in any
language,
a word billowing enough
for the pleasure
that fills you,
as the sun
reaches out,
as it warms you
as you stand there,
empty-handed–
or have you too
turned from this world–
or have you too
gone crazy
for power,
for things?

Eventually I memorized both. And this one too, by Wendell Berry, a poet-activist-farmer from Kentucky whose comfort in the natural world (despite chaos in our manmade world) fortifies my own. In this short animation, commissioned by the OnBeing podcast, Berry reads The Peace of Wild Things himself.

(Film credit: Charlotte Ager and Katy Wang. Music and sound: David Kamp.)

I would love to, one day, have a shelfful of poems to recite on a dime for any occasion. In times of joy, despair, and life in between. For friends. For children and grandchildren. But especially for myself, so I remember that I belong to a wider family of humans. The poets make art of experience, and they walk alongside us, lighting the way with their words and wisdom. Like a blessing. Like a benediction.

Lisa Groen (that’s me) is the author of The Cassatt Sisters, a novel about American Impressionist Mary Cassatt. I’m also a spiritual guide, a graduate of The Shalem Institute. I believe art, love, and spirit flow together naturally.