Mining For Hidden Gems

I was thirteen when I started collecting poetry.  Most of the time I did not even understand what the poems were saying, but I liked their sound; I liked the way they played with words and used them to stab or caress my heart.  Of course, writing poetry was out of the question.  Poets were born, not bred.  They had extraordinary talents and could talk in a mysterious, veiled form about lofty topics.  At fifteen I moved to the United States and started studying in English.  I could read and understand almost anything in English, except poetry.  I knew the words individually but somehow the way they were put together to make poems made them sound foreign to me.  So I put poetry aside. Thirty years later, as I studied to be a teacher, I learned to use poetry to build reading fluency.  By then English had moved from being my second language to become the language of my thinking.  I had come to find poets like Emily Dickinson, Langston Hugh...