August 20, 2009

Out of the silence

I work in a Friends School. I went to a Friends School. I love that once again, our president's children attend a Friends School. I like to say that if I was in charge of the world, everyone would get a Friends education.

In a Quaker Meeting for Worship, you sit in silence, on plain benches, with no liturgy, no clergy, and no iconography. If you are moved to speak, you stand a deliver a message to the meeting.

I have this vision of poetry that connects to Quaker Meeting. It's as though the people who wrote the poems I love are sitting in a Meetinghouse, outside of time and space, and the poems rise -- in no particular order -- out of that silence. Regardless of when they were written, how well known they are, I carry them with me in that way. The quieter I get, the easier it is for them to rise.

This might be idealistic, but the internet can function that way. It also exists outside of time and space, and though it's full of noise, anyone can rise and deliver a message.

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