Poets Within

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"There is a great need for seniors to read, listen, talk and share," said AFTA instructor Julia Burger of her poetry program. Both Julia and Carol Siegel have been presenting poetry to seniors at adult care centers with AFTA for the last year and a half. During this time, the programs and the participants have evolved. Seniors who said they could not write poetry are doing just that. They are sharing their feelings openly in discussion groups, the poetry a catalyst. And with remarkable poignancy the seniors persevere; reading stanzas of poetry through speech impediments and disabilities from stroke paralysis, pronunciation challenges when English is a second language, and even illiteracy. 

I recently observed a program that illustrated how profoundly poetry can align our senses with the pace of the natural world. Julia introduced the work of Robert Service, a nineteenth century poet whose writing explores the Yukon Territory during the Goldrush. She read from The Three Voices, in which Service describes how the waves, wind and stars, nature's "anthem of glory," spared him from the taint of gold-lust. And as she read, the season's first snow promptly began to fall. After the program, a senior who had arrived late, unable to divert her attention from the deluge of televised election coverage, said she was most grateful to have come. Like Robert Service, she and I and the other participants were filled with reverence for nature that day, as the eruption of snow eclipsed both the autumn sky and the torrent of current events. 

Carol Siegel has made strong connections with participants during her poetry programs. After reading Pulitzer Prize winning poet Mary Oliver's Wild Geese to a group of psychologically impaired seniors recently, several of them shared stunning childhood memories. “You do not have to be good/You do not have to walk on your knees/for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting...” Carol asked the seniors to recall if they had ever been told they did not have to be good.  One responded, quietly, that she had been labeled "no good" . . . Silence. Another added that her parents told her she would never amount to anything. The quiet that ensued was finally broken by the sound of group members gently comforting one another, consoling, supporting and understanding each other. 

There was one more extraordinary happening on the day it snowed during Julia's workshop: when the program ended, precisely one hour after it had begun, so too did the blizzard-like November snow. Its only traces were the wet ground and the surprised expressions on the seniors' faces. The snow was poetic, as if to say it had fallen just for them. “...Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,/the world offers itself to your imagination,/calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--/over and over announcing your place/in the family of things.” --Wild Geese.

Janine Tursini, AFTA Program Director