“I’m having a poetry reading tomorrow evening from 6 to 8,” Jacob announced to the creative writing class.
I’d never been to a poetry reading. I didn’t know what to expect.
A circle of metal folding chairs sat on a gray concrete floor.
One by one we arrived. Taking a chair – Jacob, Aaron, Teddy, James, me, Sam, Carina, Amy, Vicky and Anna – we formed a circle. Jacob’s circle.
We took turns reading poetry and short pieces of prose. Some we had written ourselves. Others were pieces by our favorite authors.
Some read. Some just listened.
We were a circle sharing artistic creations whose origins are in the human spirit.
As I sat in the circle, I felt like I was part of a tradition that stretched back to ancient Greece. I could see us in white robes sitting on a grass-covered hillside overlooking Athens as we read to each other under a blue sky filled with billowing white clouds.
That’s when I realized, instead of a circle, it was more like a spiral.
A spiral through time.
Through countless thousands of people over thousands of years.
But whose spiral?
One of the playwright’s? Aristophanes? Euripides? Sophocles?
Or a poet’s? Hesiod? Homer?
A philosopher’s? Epicurus? Socrates? Plato?
Or perhaps the spiral began with some nameless person on the African Savannah tens of thousands of years ago.
We will probably never know who started this spiral of circles.
But then, it doesn’t matter, just as long as the circles continue.
This one’s Jacob’s.