Memories Make the Best Birthday Gifts: Why I Love and Follow So Many Poets.

Well, I have completed another turn around the Sun, number 72. A classmate posted a happy birthday wish on my Facebook account this morning. He reminded me of a part I played in a play in the sixth grade, I believe. We learned the poem, The Great Guest Came, by Edwin Markham. The poem is based on Matthew 25:36-45. I played the crone given bread to eat. I was astounded that my classmate, after nearly 60 years, would write that he recalled my performance, and on my 72nd birthday!

I looked up the poem, and I remembered it immediately. Mrs. Hawkins was our teacher, and she instilled in us a love of poetry and reminded us of the power of words to touch souls and heal them. I still remember how she expected emotions to show when we recited James Weldon Johnson’s The Creation. In the 1950s and 1960s, she knew it was essential to her young black students’ sense of value as human beings to learn the works of male and female black poets. We had to learn to recite each one word for word. She taught us Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Johnson.

I came to love poetry, particularly with a rhyme. But I remember Langton Hughes’s Me and My Baby Got Two Mo Ways and I, Too, Sing American, which were more challenging to learn because they lacked rhyme. We stood up proud and stated, “I , too, sing America. I am the darker brother. They send me to eat in the kitchen when company comes…” Glorious words.

So, it is no wonder that of the over 200 blogs I follow, over half are poets whose words and rhymes each day give me a new thrill. Judy Dykstra-Brown at Life Lessons is a wordsmith extraordinaire. It’s too many to name, but I look forward to their comforting, sometimes humorous, words and wish I was as good. Mrs. Hawkins imbued a lifelong love of words and their power in her students. Sixty years later, I still appreciate her caring and loving teaching. My thanks to the classmate who reminded me that memories are the best gifts to receive on your birthday.