Poem In Your Pocket Day
Today, April 30, is National Poem In Your Pocket Day. No, I don’t know who established it. Its after our TCAP tests in Tennessee, so I’m sure we won’t celebrate it in our classes across the state. Yet, poetry is one of the most beautiful art forms we can embed into the minds and hearts of our nation’s children.
Poetry leads to music. It makes rhetorical speeches eloquent. It lifts the heart. It expresses our inner angst in a way no other medium can.
Today’s observance is not about those poems you have to look up and read (even though you love them so much). It is about those poems you carry with you. The ones you have memorized. On Facebook this morning, I posted this one I learned nearly 25 years ago:
A diamond in the rough is a diamond sure enough / For before it ever sparkled it was made of diamond stuff / But someone had to find it or it never would be found / And someone had to grind it or it never would be found / But once its found and once its ground and once its burnished bright / That diamond’s everlastingly just shining out its light.
Back about five lives ago, I worked for our denominational publishing house. Part of my job was to travel to Christian education workshops. Sometimes I ran the bookstore. Sometimes I got to lead workshops. Sometimes I did both. It was always fun.
My boss at the time, Tony Capps, pulled this poem out of the air one day as part of his opening keynote. I was mesmerized by its simple beauty and its telling way it describes the job of a teacher. I committed it to memory after hearing it once. I still use it occasionally when I lead education workshops across Tennessee.
As teachers, we sometimes gripe about the kids we have. We wish we had more technology. Better textbooks. More supplies. More time. Fewer students. Shorter weeks…. You know what I’m talking about. And yet, too often we forget that we are diamond miners. We are digging through rock and dirt. We are getting dirty in our attempts to find the diamond buried beneath the surface of each one of the precious children placed in our care. (Yes, I said precious).
Thanks Tony. 25 years later you are still impacting kids in ways you never dreamed possible.