August 11, 2025 - Good Morning! It’s Monday, August 11.
I’ve recently taken up a new hobby. I grew up in a home where the practice of memorization was highly prized. My father spent his life “hiding” the Word of God in his heart, and encouraged his children to pursue that calling. Over the last half century I’ve been blessed to have had that opportunity.
But this past May I began a different focus. I began memorizing poems. That was a practice encouraged by my elementary school teachers, but one that I had set aside for over 50 years. It has been a blessing to set aside about an hour a day for this new pursuit. I average about 3 poems a week. The shortest so far - just one verse - is by Edna St. Vincent Millay. You’ve probably heard it ...
My candle burns at both ends / it will not last the night
But ah my foes and oh my friends / it gives a lovely light!
The longest, coincidentally also by Millay, is called “The Ballad of the Harp Weaver”. It won her the Pulitzer Prize in 1920, and clocks in at 30 verses. That one took me the better part of a week to conquer. My latest is another long poem - “Casey at the Bat”. It’s a fun one! I’ve memorized works by famous poets like Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg and Emily Dickinson, classics by Longfellow and Wordsworth and Shakespeare, and some modern poets too. But their modern style of “free verse” is more challenging for me to memorize. I prefer the regular rhythm of rhyme.
Rhyme isn’t a part of biblical poetry. The great poems in Psalms make use of a different style, a different tool - parallelism. While Shakespeare rhymed words - King David rhymed ideas. Time and time again we observe him, and other psalmists, repeating ideas, repeating phrases, but with slight alterations each time. Psalm 95 is a good example . . .
O come, let us sing unto the Lord / Let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation
Let us come before His presence with thanksgiving / and make a joyful noise unto Him with psalms
For the Lord is a great God / and a great King above all gods
In His hand are the deep places of the earth / the strength of the hills is His also
The sea is His and He made it / and His hands formed the dry land
O come, let us worship and bow down / Let us kneel before the Lord our maker
Psalm 95 is my memory poem for today.
Meet you back here tomorrow,
David
cindertex50@yahoo.com
