“Hey, Emily!” yelled my squad leader on one of our first days of ministry, “This guy does Spoken Word poetry!”
“Wow, no way, that’s awesome, me too!” I exclaimed as I shook his hand. I knew there were people who performed poetry all over the world but I did not expect to run into another English-speaking wordsmith at any point in my 11 months away from home. Yet, there I was introducing myself to a 23-year-old man, living in West Africa, who has a passion for reaching the lost through imagery, symbolism and metaphors just as I do. What are the odds? Someone who speaks my language literally and figuratively.
Throughout this month we’ve been talking tones, volume, pitch, verbiage and themes. It feels so wonderful to talk about other poets with another poet who knows exactly who and what I’m talking about. We’ve even gone deeper as he shared parts of his story with me and I shared parts of mine with him because we can relate to one another artist to artist and feeler to feeler. Artists feel in a much different way than others do. Even artists in different disciplines sometimes find it hard to relate to one another. No one understands a painter more than another painter just as no one understands another instrumentalist as well as another instrumentalist. Poets have an emotional language of their own too. Even without speaking, we know that we understand each other though our emotions manifest themselves in vastly different ways. It’s nice to know that we both just know.
I practiced my poetry with him to lightning bolt his thundering passion and reignite my own. I performed in the youth service to encourage all of them to appreciate the pictures painted by us as versifiers. It was one of the most fulfilling things I had done in a long while. It was pleasurable and meaningful all at once.
He told me once that he had a passion for spreading God’s love through poetry all over the world. He was planning on leaving everything and moving to Accra, the capital of Ghana, to join a team of like-minded people. He lived and breathed God and poetry. I felt convicted because I quit doing poetry for God or at all. I quit because I was so concerned with being productive that I no longer had time. I quit because I let my life as a student teacher take over and my passion was lost.
I shared with him a poem I had written only days before. No one else had heard it. In that moment, I realized that passion was far more powerful than any kind of progress I could make. I watched him close his eyes and hold out his hands, taking it all in. When I was finished he stood in silence for a moment and said, “wow.” He didn’t say wow because of the quantity of my works. He said wow because of the quality of my words. The words God gave me just for him in that moment.
He is all in. I know because he said it himself, “You can’t be almost saved. I mean, ladies, would you really date a guy who’s almost straight?” ~Zeus Emmanuel freestyling in Sunyani, Ghana.
When you find something you love to do, do it for God and run with it. Run with it for miles and miles. He gave it to you. It’s a gift. Don’t let it fall to the wayside. I can assure you that passion is more life giving than productivity. Your passion is alive.
When Nouns Are Verbs/ My Poetry is Alive
My poetry is alive
My poetry is ever flowing
Like the rushing of a waterfall.
I never perform the same poem twice
I feel it transforming, ebbing and flowing
you’re alive and I’m alive
And that makes us both nouns and verbs
Just like my poetic words
My words and your words are always breathing and beating
Just as we do to keep awake
My poetry is alive
I can feel its heartbeat
Next to mine
I can crawl around and see into its mind
I know who it wants to touch
I see who it needs to be
It’s almost human just like you and me
My poetry becomes a verb when it flows past my fingertips and onto blank paper
To poetry is to love
To poetry is to see and to speak
But most of all… To poetry is to be fluid
Just as all living creatures are with venous syntactical lines, pumping life to the whole of its being.
I poetry, I am poetrying every hour of my life, I poetry.
I am a verb.
to me is to place verbiage and vernacular into a syntax full of morphemes, phonemes and synonyms.
To be meing is to be loving humans through homonyms, antonyms and similes
That counteract their worldview and remind them that they’re still living.
Ever present, ever changing
And you. You are a verb.
To you is to make something and give something and take something.
What it is to you is constant but the way you are youing is always changing
Even in that consistency, I believe that “a man never steps into the same river twice”
I think Hippocrates would agree, “for he is not the same man and it is not the same river.”
Just so, I have never talked to the same person for more than a single moment.
We are all rivers and we let others step into us
Because we are verbs always changing, always flowing
Just as this will never be the same poem ever again
It only happens once and you’re the lucky ones who get to hear it
So, step into this poem and walk around in it while you can
Because next time I speak it you won’t be youing in quite the same way
And this poem won’t be poetrying quite like it used to
They tell me Memorize. Memorize your poetry
But how can I memorize the way the ocean will rise and fall with the tide each day?
You know it will but you don’t know how.
The waves have never hit the shore in this way before.
How can I keep this in my brain while letting it be the action verb it was meant to be?
Letting it be itself without the hindrance of its vocabulary stuck in a jail cell inside my hippocampus
I’ll side with humanity and never memorize my poetry
It’s got a personality I can’t and shouldn’t control.
Its actions would surely test my sanity
Were I to lock it in the asylum of my mind.
This poem is a noun and a verb
To poem today is to explain
But tomorrow it’s definition may slightly change because the same ears will no longer be listening
Even if it’s you youing again.
This is my poetry. My nouns that are verbs
My words that together make a living creature
Much like the layers of systems running through my body
each a vital part of making me move and shake.
This is my poem and I’m giving it to you
take it and turn it around in your hands.
Step into it.
become a friend to it
Because tomorrow, tomorrow
None of it will be the same to you
Because it’s words will grow up within you
And its seed will turn into a tree
And that tree will change its leaves come fall and spring.
Take it. Take it in your hands. Get to know it well.
Let it grow in your mind because it’s yours too now
I’m giving it to you.
Take caution. Take care.
One day its semantics may catch you unaware.
