About a week ago, I saw my son, Daniel, in his computer viewing a 10-minute video that had been emailed to him by a classmate who had videotaped her friends for a class project. He was in the video, Litany of Love, reciting a rap poem that he had composed and committed to memory.
I watched it with him and was impressed with what I saw. I asked my son to email the video to me and when he did, I proudly posted it on my Facebook page. Friends who watched it eagerly asked me for a copy of his poem. When I asked Daniel, he said he didn’t have it in writing but it was in his head and he would type it out. On Christmas Day, I got my wish.
When I read his poem, I was impressed by my 21-year old son’s deep insight into life and love. It isn’t often that today’s young kids talk about love, certainly not in the same romantic way that my generation did. At least that’s what I thought until I read his poem.
One generational difference I noticed is that older generations often talked romantically of finding “the right partner” or what my son refers to in the poem as “the catch”. While Paul Newman once said that it is more important to be the right partner, Daniel tells us that there is no such thing as a perfect "match" for us -“we are all catches…because we are all patches for each other’s imperfections.”
May 2010 keep us all safe from typhoons flooding, volcanoes erupting, ferries sinking, journalists killing, terrorists bombing and elections cheating. Ok, I’m not a poet but my son surely is.
Love is the next truth
By Daniel Rodis
Prone to a lonely outlook
My seeking fingers would lose hope
In the cold of uncertainty
And that’s partially because I’d lost hold of a certain she
And it burned deep.
But luckily, tucked deep in the fold of what was hurting me
I found gold and it’s working, see
The unconscious chatter of society
Although marred by an overhyped notoriety
Is making the real, real quietly.
And though truly it might lie to me
The rising word is these five to be:
Love is the next truth.
And I am calm.
Faith in the inevitable beauty of the future is a place,
And I love through you.
True, she was a catch,
But the real catch is
That we are all catches
So it doesn’t matter who matches,
Because we are all patches
For each other’s imperfections.
And through our personal affections, and gravity
We’ll align and happily
We’ll combine for this simplest of lines…
Love is the next truth.
And let it be
Let it be meaning, submitting to our dreaming
And start being the living word.
Giving birth to word is born
And giving earth to a new world dawn
In a circle
And in our cycle, sometimes you gotta lose your first to get a real tooth
As if sadness must crack the embryonic youth
To open up
For universal love:
The next truth.
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