How do you like to go up in a swing,                                                                                     Up in the air so blue?                                                                                                                     Oh, I do think it the pleasantest thing                                                                                     Ever a child can do!

from “The Swing” by Robert Louis Stevenson

I remember pouring over my hardback copy of Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses,  memorizing “The Swing” so I could recite it when I was walking to school or swinging in Harmon Park. In fourth grade, I wrote and illustrated my first book of poetry. And around my family’s supper table, poetry was served up nightly.

I grew up in a sanctuary of poetry. My father, a poet and teacher of poetry, claimed that everyone has a poem in his hidden head. It was his life’s mission to tease those poems out of budding poets’ hidden heads.

Doug H. was a hulking, second-year high school senior. When my dad visited his school for a poetry residency, his teacher took him aside to prepare him for Doug. He won’t do anything, she said, but if you leave him alone, he will just sit quietly in the back. True to form, Doug’s sullen shape cast a foreboding silhouette in the corner of the classroom. He was a presence.

As students bent over their desks, writing themselves out of their hidden heads, Doug alternately looked on and slept. On the final day of the residency, my dad asked students to think of a person who had made a mark on their lives, a person whose life and work deeply mattered to them. Then, he instructed, think of that one object that most represents that person. For my father, it would be his duck decoys, he said, and for my father-in-law, his tackle box. Write about that object. 

In a cinematic moment made for Lifetime television, Doug raised his head from the desk, searched his pocket for a pencil, removed a single sheet of notebook paper, and began to write. My dad recalls that he walked about the room watching students write, but he stayed clear of Doug, not wanting to spook him. At the end of the session, students passed their poems to the front, and my dad quickly read through them, selecting a few to be read aloud.

When my dad came to Doug’s poem, “Grandpa,” he understood, once more, the power of the hidden head.

Grandpa

He was six foot three                                                                                                              with old age                                                                                                                          carved on his face.            

He usually sat                                                                                                                                in a rocker                                                                                                                                       whittling a stick                                                                                                                               and humming                                                                                                                                 a certain song.

He was rocking                                                                                                                                 one day                                                                                                                until he rocked                                                                                                                                 no more.

Eyes and mouth                                                                                                                                I shut,                                                                                                                                         stick and knife                                                                                                   on the floor.                         

Doug H.

As my dad read Doug’s poem aloud, anonymously, a pall fell upon the room until one student exclaimed, Who wrote that? As was my dad’s practice, he let the poet claim his own work–or not. From the corner of the room, Doug said, I did. Although no one in the room spoke, it was evident that something sacred had happened, something that all would remember as an authentic testament to the power of poetry.

This would be a great story for the sanctuary of poetry if it ended right there. But it does not. Several years later when my dad was traveling through that town en route to another residency, he stopped at a local gas station. Just as he was about to fill his car, he heard a voice: Hey, do you remember me? It was a grown-up Doug, now working at the local gas station. I do, my dad said. Doug smiled, patted his back pocket and announced, I’ve got my poem with me still. Right here. 

In the sanctuary of poetry, we all would do well to carry our best poems–or someone’s best poem–in our pockets. Daily. For the words of these poems, the poems that come dearly from the hidden head, are the words of life, the words of beauty and truth, the words of pain and wisdom. They are the words that anchor us to all that matters.

In the introduction to the anthology, Few Shape Absence Into Memorable Air, my dad writes: A very few of these poems occurred as gifts. More, like diamonds, were given worth by force. All are crystallizations of solitudes now past. 

In the sanctuary of poetry, there are those rare poems that burst from the hidden head as gifts. Almost perfect in their imagery and prosody. On that day in that Nebraska classroom, Doug’s poem was a genuine gift–to the sanctuary of poetry, but most importantly, to him.

But most, as my dad writes, take their worth by force. In reading through my dad’s notebooks, I am profoundly moved by the force through which his poetry was crafted. Sometimes a line is changed, sometimes a single word. Sometimes a stanza is removed, sometimes a single line retained. Yet in the end, the poem, the crystallization of solitudes now past, remains. What has been taken by force for the writer becomes a gift for the reader.

If I were to carry a single poem in my pocket, I would find it unbearingly difficult to choose a single Don Welch poem. In the sanctuary of poetry, however, it is also permissible to carry poems in the pockets of our hearts and souls. And these pockets are deep enough to house as many poems as we want to store there.

I do know the first poem I will place into my heart’s pocket, though. Taken by force through countless revisions, this poem is one that has certainly won the Doug-stamp-of-approval.

LINES FOR MY FATHER

I love you, old man, in our time.                                                                                         The shotgun cradled in your arm,                                                                                       the marbled wood,                                                                                                                    the varnished sky.

The milo’s cut.                                                                                                                          The fence holds leaves.                                                                                                          The thicket has its quail                                                                                                        and  final green.

We walk.                                                                                                                                       We clot in time.                                                                                                The fence sings birdless                                                                                                            in the wind.

Don Welch