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| (Image from Masons Attic) |
Thank You for Teaching Me
(A Haiku-Style Poem With Multiple Stanzas)
Thank you for teaching
me to be responsible
for all things in life!
Thank you for teaching
me to be accountable
for mending my strife!
Thank you for teaching
me to be independent
in all things I do!
Thank you for teaching
me to be one who teaches
others—just like you!
-Paul Whiting
(a.k.a., Small All White in the Forest)
"I am no barrier to its sun; the light and I are as one!"
My Poetic Notes:
The reason that I wrote this poem can be summed up with the following statement: I reread the "Conversations with God" series of books [which I reread from just shortly after June 5th, 2016 to exactly September 12th, 2016]...
...And I was rereading "Conversations with God: An Uncommon Dialogue, Book 1," when I read the quote below on page 114, which reminded me of how my father, who passed away in 2018, raised us kids—while our mother was dealing with a lot of physical and psychological issues, which she experienced her entire life. Here is that quote:
"My pay—the payoff you get when you 'work for' Me—provides a great deal more than spiritual comfort. Physical comfort, too, can be yours. Yet the ironic part about all this is that, once you experience the kind of spiritual comfort My payoff provides, the last thing you’ll find yourself worrying about is physical comfort.
Even the physical comfort of members of your family will no longer be a concern to you—for once you rise to a level of God consciousness you will understand that you are not responsible for any other human soul, and that while it is commendable to wish every soul to live in comfort, each soul must choose—is choosing—its own destiny this instant.
Clearly, it is not the highest action to deliberately abuse or destroy another. Clearly, it is equally inappropriate to neglect the needs of those you have caused to be dependent on you.
Your job is to render them independent; to teach them as quickly and completely as possible how to get along without you."
And I felt so inspired by the quote above, that I wrote this poem on July 6th, 2016 (ten days before my father's 86th birthday), which started out as a classic Haiku-style poem, but ended up being "a multiple-stanza Haiku-style poem," as I explained more of what I meant about this feeling.
I should mention that this poem was written for—and posted on—Facebook, way back when I was actually on Facebook, which I haven't been for years...
And this poem was also published on my "Paul Whiting — A Creative Writer" blog (please see the hyperlink below for the blog), since I feel that the message in this poem applies to the message that I am trying to convey through "Paul Whiting — A Creative Writer."
This poem was written in Portland, Oregon.
However, even though this poem was not written in Salt Lake City, I still have this poem labeled under "My Utah Writing," since the topic of this poem is based upon my family, who live predominantly in Utah.
-Paulee
https://paulwhitingwriting.blogspot.com
This "Small All White in the Forest" Post No. 207 was edited on May 3rd, 2024.
"Poetry is using the fewest words possible in order to describe all that is possible to describe." –Paul Whiting [June 1st, 2022]
My poems that are Haiku in their style—within which one stanza is composed of three lines, where each line has words containing five syllables, seven syllables and five syllables, respectively—are a lot more like Senryū poems in that the topic of these poems is typically about people, rather than the topic of these poems being about nature, as is usually the case in classic Haiku poems. And that is why I call these types of poems "Haiku-style." –Paul Whiting [September 19th, 2023]
