Petra's Poem, Life Lines, Lyric

The other day was a beautiful afternoon in Portland, the warmest in six months.  A little kid, about four, was walking a curb tight-rope style in the little park on Fore Street.  “Petra!” called her young mother.  "Be careful!”

I had never heard that name before, except for the city in Jordan I visited at age of six when my parents brought us there,  each kid sleeping on a seat of the red-and-white volkswagon bus.

“Did you name her after the city?” I asked.  “No, I never heard of it," she says, one eye on the child. “It’s a famous, ancient city in Jordan. It’s all carved out of red cliffs, sandstone. It was one of those 'wonders of the world.' ”   She doesn’t seem all that interested. “It’s really famous. There’s even a poem about it"---then I see her eyes go bright as I recite the famous line.  “It goes:  a rose-red city, half as old as time.”  Her eyes shine into mine.  "I'm going to look it up."

So John William Burgon (1813-1888) added his bit of excitement to the world, and achieved what Frost said was his own whole intention:  to lodge a poem where it would be hard to get rid of.  This sort of memorability was the focus of the Academy of American Poets' National Poetry Month campaign a few years back, called Life Lines.  I loved how Life Lines renewed attention to the essential usefulness of poetry in daily life, sometimes so easy to forget in these days of professionalized poetry.  As Johathan Culler wrote, in his recent essay "Why Lyric,"

"Lyric poems . . . ask to be learned by heart, taken in, introjected, or housed as bits of alterity that can be repeated, considered, treasured, or ironically cited. The force of poetry is linked to its ability to get itself remembered, like those bits of song that stick in your mind, you don’t know why."

What poems have done that in your mind lately?