Written Prayers

I first encountered poetry back in elementary school

It sounded like a spoken rap so I thought that it was cool

There was one about a girl who wouldn’t take out the trash and a robot who wouldn’t obey.

Another one about a dad who couldn’t carve turkey and a man confused about his way.

I thought all poems should rhyme, this made sense to me,

My elementary experience with poems was just that, elementary.

It was in high school I learned more about structure, rhythm, and prose.

Elements of poems was where time was spent.

I paid attention to the different genres we would cover,

And this is how the year pretty much went,

The hanging clock slowly counted the time,

The kids sentenced to an hour of sentence,

As the teachers tried to capture kids minds,

Through a language that lied in omittance,

As Shakespeare compared us to summer days,

And Whitman sent a president to sea,

We’d rather be compared to Beyonces,

And have the teacher send us home early.

And we also delved into the Epics,

Dante’s Inferno and the Odyssey,

9 circles of hell, Dante depicts,

Homer, a hero who circles the sea.

This poetry not only shaped history,

But also gave shape to things mystery.

However, it was in college when I truly understood, the power of poetry,

How it could caress the ear, inspire the mind, and heal the heart.

It is the therapist, purging oneself of its own thoughts and feelings.

It is the activist lacing people up with the problems and demanding they march towards an answer.

It is the artist, crafting words, using pens and tongues as mediums.

It is the reporter, acknowledging the time, and counting the defining events of them.

Poetry is the messiah of the literary world,

And when I write it is an ink-filled prayer.