Poetry for the Soul

This weekend cried for poetry. Poetry digs into the soul without seeming whiny like prose. I whined and I apologize, especially for the Saturday post. A month or two back, my words tumbled over each other in a rhyming rhythm. I'm not a poet, but those days poems crept to the surface.
I learn from poetry workshops about descriptive words. The speaker urging us to mine that one word to fill the emotion, scene and flavor. I float out of those lectures. It has been too long since I have sat in one.
I noticed the North Pocono Community Library sponsors a poetry night this week. The high school students star with open mike. I think back on Katie and Mary Ellen in their eighth grade English class with a coffee house performance for the parents. Sitting at a midsize desk, listening to some wonderfully beautiful poetry and readings. I love emerging creativity. In this class, both girls jumped on the thought, they are writers, to make this a career. I can thank this English teacher, too, for sending it home to me, reviving a skill in me.
Another former student of hers, writes poetry on a blog that I follow. I know this young man and find he is growing in writing. A thoughtful soul exploring his relationship with Jesus. One poem, I knew he wrote after visiting home, as we both moved by the service and sermon in church one day, wrote about it. He affirmed my suspicion. http://comingback777.blogspot.com/ Matt's blog. I also look at the ads on his blog, to help him out.
Poetry answers questions of the soul with its searching and pleading to make sense. The Psalms in the Bible lift me out of depression many times over the years. Some times I take a break from reading them. I return and wonder why did I ever take a break? A psalm plunges into the dark depth of the spirit, but gasps, reaches and finally clasps onto God, renewing faith, hope and love. Helps a lot with those feelings of revenge, too.
My poems are not Browning, Frost or Dickinson, but my feeble attempts feed my soul. When I post them, I hope that they in some way lift up a soul at the time they need a refreshing. If not, they refresh me. Bright sunshine does the trick, too.