Our job is to become more and more of what we are. The growth of a poet seems to be related to his or her becoming less and less embarrassed about more and more.
—Marvin Bell

In Junior High, when I was learning to punch things and bleed without crying, I also wrote poems. It wasn’t an assignment. I was fourteen. There were things boiling within, the steam needed an exit. Whether typed and printed or dashed out on a legal pad, the pages accumulated until I called it a ‘book.’ I wrote “Intention for Comprehension” as a title on the front page. And then, promptly, buried it under my mattress.

I couldn’t have told you exactly why I hid it. Or maybe I could have. I was a boy on the edge. Poetry was a liability. But, then, what of the title? What else could that mean but, “please understand me.” The two needs warred within, torn between the urge to be known and fear of what might happen if I was.

If you polled every last person in the world, I’m sure you’d find that, at one point or another, they’ve written a poem. Not the Haiku assigned in third grade. I’m thinking of the visceral thing composed on the edge of love. Maybe it’s never written down but goes on shaking about, caged in a dusty corner of the mind. It’s more than just poetry, though. Prayer, doubt, sin, a childhood wound, we roam around looking for someone worthy of our story and worried when we find them that we are wrong.

What keeps it all hidden away? 
Isn’t it a far greater risk to go on anonymous?

Towards the tragic end of Shakespeare’s King Lear the character Edgar breaks the fourth wall, saying, “Speak what you feel, not what you ought to say.” Reject the script, the actor begs us. Don’t think boyhood is just about blood and clenched fists. Bring those imperfect poems out from under the mattress. Invite someone, for a moment or two, to listen. Risk the possibility of misunderstanding for the potential of hearing, “That was fantastic, could I share mine?”

As a High Schooler I brought out that book to friends. It was at a Bible study, a new experience for me—and I imagined it was the place for self-disclosure. After reading a poem and seeing blank stares and hearing a few forced compliments, I put the book back under my bed. It would be years before I brought it out again.

The word “vulnerability” comes from the word “to wound.” Being vulnerable doesn’t require you to share your wounds but to drop your shield. You must become woundable. The calculating type, those bent on self-preservation, scaling, and seizing, might say vulnerability is too much of a liability. Hold it in, in order to advance. Why drop the shield in a world filled with swords?

Like swollen eyed boxers, these thoughts go on trading blows. To say the thing. To retract into the self, holding the shield tighter. It is, I imagine, the same for all of us. The confession of sin. The doubt. The hidden art. The expression of love. Often you can only see this tension in quick breaths, a grimace, or tightened shoulders.

The Gospel of John tells us “the Word became flesh.” Imagine it, a word within the heart of God, going on unspoken until, at the right time, it is written into a sworded world as a blinking and breathing peasant baby. From start to finish this Word was misread. We could only guess at his angst, when his friends went on happily in their thick-skulls as he tried to tell them plain truth. He’d be doubted and called a demon. Nature, red in tooth and claw, would, finally, seize upon this shieldless man, not knowing what to do with such beauty but kill it.

What might heaven’s Word say to that boy in my past? 
What might he say to you? 
Fear not, perhaps, beauty always finds its way, even through death. 

I am guessing.

But I know, and He proves it, that all of us—even God—long to be to be known and that the only way—even for him—is the frustrating, heart-pounding path of vulnerability.

Bryan Halferty has been published in The Anglican Theological Review, The Penwood Review, and more recently on Mockingbird. He has also had a new poem published in Ekstasis. He is, additionally, the Lead Pastor of Anchor Church, in Tacoma, Washington.