I am known to cut the silence in a room by reciting a poem. I can recite so many poems by heart, and I love to recite them!
This past week, Jeff and I had traveled to the Carrizo Plain to witness the grand Super Bloom of the wildflowers this spring. In my last blog post, I wrote about the Super Bloom. So many times during the days we traveled, the whole poem, “Afternoon on a Hill,” by Edna St. Vincent Millay, came into my mind, “whole,” I like to say. I recited the poem to Jeff and our friends as we drove among the hills, all wearing wildflowers in vivid colors.
Thank you, Miss Ross – my English teacher for grades 7, 8, and 9 at Peckham Junior High School in Milwaukee. Every week, the assignment was given to memorize a poem. One of us was called without warning to recite the poem to the class on Friday. In my memory, I see myself standing before the class, saying out loud a poem I had memorized in my small bedroom of our upper flat on the North Side of Milwaukee. As shy as I was, I was never too nervous to stand in front of a group, to speak. I’m surprised, as I remember so many times I was called to do so.
We studied the writers, too, and each one of us put together books with the words to poems copied, and pictures which we’d cut out of magazines to go with the poems. I carefully pasted photos from Ladies’ Home Journal and McCalls to go with the poems I’d memorized.
Later, after I’d left Junior High and moved on to high school, I memorized another poem, longer this time: “The Night Before Christmas.” Every December, I try to find an audience to let me recite the poem. Some things in my life I don’t remember anymore, but the poems I committed to memory still live inside of me. I like that. And I’m grateful, always, to Miss Ross, in her navy blue polka dotted dress, black shoes and carefully set hair, who gave me the gift of these poems.
Thank you, Miss Ross!
TheWisdomYears.org 