A Piece of Delight

The last post was a draft I had to wait till today to finish, but I'm wanting to catch up on all the non-posting days I've had this week. And since I'm in the vein of other people's poetry, I may as well continue.

A writing teacher named Marjorie Frank wrote that if you want a lot of [writing] output from kids, you have to give a lot of input. (That's not word for word, but pretty close.) I've often noticed how true that is for me, but I just as often forget it and think I'm going to write something great without bothering to read anything great! Blatant arrogance, on my part! And foolishness. So, I'm trying to get "input," by reading more.

The painful thing about reading poetry, if you read anything good, is that you need to share it with somebody. And who reads poetry? It seems kind of out of date. The whole point of communication is human beings understanding each other. When you understand, and delight, you want other people to understand and delight. That's the whole idea of sharing your faith as a Christian, too, I think. You find life, and you have to share it. I'm sure God meant for other delightful things to be shared as well! So, here I'll share a poem that has delighted me since the first moment I read it, curled up in my Dad's chair entrenched in a gloomy english textbook:

BEING HER FRIEND

Being her friend, I do not care, not I,
How gods or men may wrong me, beat me down;
Her word's sufficient star to travel by,
I count her quiet praise sufficient crown.

Being her friend, I do not covet gold,
Save for a royal gift to give her pleasure;
To sit with her, and have her hand to hold,
Is wealth, I think, surpassing minted treasure.

Being her friend, I only covet art,
A white pure flame to search me as I trace
In crooked letters from a throbbing heart
The hymn to beauty written on her face.

— John Masefield, Poems
Macmillan, New York (1951)

And oh, how I ache to be "her"!