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In Faith, I Bow to Poetry | Merna Ann Hecht

IPM Team
Oct 5, 2022
1 min read

Updated: Mar 16, 2023

A photo of a fuchsia flower with a yellow middle and green and teal stem on a black background. The is a poem by Merna Ann Hecht titled "In Faith, I Bow to Poetry" (In honor of teaching poetry for the Stories of Arrival: Refugee & Immigrant Youth Voices Poetry Project, an IPM Poetry Partner Project) that reads: "Faith in the zinnias, smallest of seeds, tiny fortunetellers/holding the secret wisdom of their own becoming, they bloom to spinning wheels of color, then take up dance in the garden./For the poetry of these flowers,/all I did was kneel to earth to plant.//Faith in the knowledge of my hands,/stirring, kneading and shaping from cornmeal,/honey, rye and wheat,/to the timeless blessing of offering the warm loaf,/saying 'take, eat, be nourished,'/an enduring faith in the yeast,/a poetry of belief that the bread will rise.//Standing on the shaky ground of a world/gone mad with greed and war,/poems of blossoming,/praise poems for the rising/bread in these years of torn plastic/bags clutched by women and children/waiting in the broken lines of forced exile/with their meager belongings,/the singing for flowers and bread was not enough.//But looking into the eyes of young people/who arrived from wars,/from the colonized ruins of our doing,/from drought and starvation,/from our rapacious appetites/digging up their sacred roots,//I found I could offer poetry's fragile seeds/so they might plant the gardens/of their own hearts,/that I could offer the honey/and good grains of language,/the yeasty, salt and spice of words,/for them to make a new vocabulary/line by line, in dignified ink,/abolishing the fracture lines and the firing lines,/writing their praise for homelands left behind,/poems of a grandmother's cooking fire,/of an uncle's sheltering arms,/poems with fair warnings of the monstrous footpring/oppression makes on any homeland whose riches it extracts,/whose land it invades,/poems of burning farms and gone from war childhood friends,/poems wise with loss and hope.//For this honor, I bow to poetry./I bow to poetry,/that she can whisper her secrets into their ears,/that she crosses closed borders/wafting unseen like the fragrance of warm bread,/that she says truth be told, razor wire be dammed,/that she insists the voices from the young/who did not make the wars,/who did not create the calamity,/are heard, in verse, in song, in heart,/in poetry."

If a line or phrase resonates with you, we invite you to use it as a starting point to create your own poem.

We welcome you to share your poem with the IPM community here: A Poetry Commons.

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