The year was 1967, and I was just a kid in a Schertz, Texas high school when a teacher I didn’t even think much of at the time cracked something open in me that never quite closed back up.
Back then, English class wasn’t for reading poems quiet at your desk. You memorized them. Then you stood up in front of God and everybody and recited them, and every forgotten word felt like a small dying right there in front of your friends.
We were told to pick a poem, minimum ten or twelve lines. I don’t rightly recall which. Most kids picked something short and safe, something they could carry without breaking a sweat.
Not me. My choice was “The Barefoot Boy,” by John Greenleaf Whittier. The poem was better than a hundred lines, wall to wall. I’d first heard it a year before, up in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, from an eighth-grade teacher who read it like it mattered, and something in me latched onto it and never quite let go. The structure pulled me in. I loved the way it moved down the page like a boy actually walking, the story underneath it, barefoot and unbothered and free.
When she called my name, I walked to the front of the room and did something none of my classmates had thought to do. I gave my own introduction first, written and memorized same as the poem, laying out what the thing meant and why it mattered.
Then I let it go.
I wasn’t interested in just saying the words right. I wanted them breathing. My voice became an instrument. I focused on pace, pitch, silence, and I moved around the front of that classroom more like a preacher working a Sunday crowd than a high school boy trying to pass English, arms doing half the talking. I wanted that poem alive in the room the same way it had come alive in me. My dream was that everyone would feel the words like I felt them.
When I finished, the quiet didn’t last. The teacher was on her feet clapping. My classmates joined her, and a couple of the boys let out one of those low whistles teenage boys save for the things they’d never admit moved them.
That teacher didn’t ask me to join the University Interscholastic League poetry team, she told me I was joining, plain and simple. She said she’d never heard a student read poetry with that kind of fire and control, and she pushed me toward more of it. She had me doing more reading, more writing, more standing up and saying true things out loud.
Nearly sixty years gone now, and I still carry that afternoon like a coin in my pocket. I still remember the prettiest girl in the class coming over and hugging me and whispering in my ear, “You sure talk pretty. I’d love to have you read more poetry just to me.”
Sometimes a teacher spots something in a kid before the kid even knows it’s there. Sometimes it’s a poem, or an assignment nobody wanted, or a burst of applause nobody saw coming, swinging open a door that was shut a moment before. A sign pointing in a direction to a destination never before considered.
Scripture says it plain, in Psalm 45:1, “My heart is stirred by a noble theme as I recite my verses for the king; my tongue is the pen of a skillful writer.” My English teacher quoted that verse to me saying memorizing verse (poetry) is a noble calling.
That old line from a Psalm in the Bible is a gift running both directions. One direction to the one who writes and the other direction to the one who reads, to the poet and the one telling the story, to whoever puts the words down and whoever’s brave enough to stand up and give them breath.
So here’s what I’d leave you with today.
Your creativity isn’t an accident. You’re a vessel, and what you write might end up part of a story bigger than you’ll ever see. Writing isn’t just spilling thoughts across a page; it’s shaping, it’s rhythm and cadence, it’s care taken on purpose. Whatever you’re putting down. Whether it be a poem, an essay, a devotional, a letter, a Bible study, or just some words on social media, do it like it matters.
Let your words carry light. May they hand out grace along the way. And let them land on somebody who’s still carrying them sixty years from now.
