Judi Boogart is this month’s featured poet, no stranger to many varied parts of Hope Church. She sings with our chancel choir and has also sung with the community choir Persisterhood, committed to social justice causes. My family also has fond memories of nature walks over the years with her and Peter, as part of the Caring for Creation ministry. Here, these interests all show up and are inspiration in her written and chosen poems. Her language helps us see the Salvador village, the humbleness, the beauty, and the hope – present in her poem, and, as we learn from Emily Dickinson, singing quietly in our souls as well. ~Rhonda
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I’ve been writing poetry on and off since grade school. One of my early poems was a 9th grade history extra-credit project in which I reduced the entire life of Julius Caesar to sixty lines of iambic rhyming verse! (No experience is wasted on a poet, right?)
In the ensuing years, I have often turned to poetry when I need to capture or make sense of an experience I’ve had. Such was the case with this one, which was written following an educational tour to Central America. We visited a village in El Salvador in January of 1992, soon after the Chapultepac Peace Accords were signed. We had listened to local pastors and priests talk about the need for reconciliation following the 12-year civil war. I latched on to this experience as a small sign of hope that despite the devastation caused by US policies and military action, renewed relations between our two countries might also be possible.
A Little Afternoon Music by Judith Boogaart
I’ve feasted on tortillas,
arroz, and frijoles, prepared
in big communal pots
in the dirt-floored kitchen.
La Mora boasts of few things:
a community pile of corn,
a new school building,
a gorgeous view,
this old guitar,
which no one plays any more.
I pick it up, and the old mayor
saunters near, singing a song,
watching me expectantly.
I must find the key
and play along.
The Salvador villager
and Norte Americana,
making music together,
across the gulf.
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One of the poems I have come to love is this little jewel from Emily Dickenson. I like the image of hope as a bird, fluttering inside me, singing and defiant in the fiercest storm, not asking anything of me but to recognize that—despite everything—it is still there.
Hope Is the Thing with Feathers by Emily Dickenson
Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,
And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.
I’ve heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.
~hosted by Randy Smit and Rhonda Edgington