Matters of the Heart - student poetry

Ahh...summer.  Sorry it has taken a while to get back to posting.

I received a number of insightful student poems and wanted to share a few.  Here is the first:

Heart of sweet, soft steel
You melt like ice cream
Yet break like a glass.
Heart, when will you learn
To not beat so fast?

I love the alliteration of "sweet, soft steel."  There's a lot there.  We often associate the heart with softness and sweetness, but the upper hook of this opening line is the heart being referred to as "steel."

It reminds me of the concept of having a "hard heart."  The notorious Pharaoh of Old Testament fame was said to have a hardened heart.  When people talk about the heart, some get annoyed because they consider this a 'mushy' subject.  Yet, out of the heart comes both love and bitterness, elation and collapse.  Jesus said as much.  This is captured so well in the next two lines where the heart is said to "melt like ice cream/ Yet break like a glass."

We are both fragile and volatile.  This is all the more reason that a meaningful life is not simply one in which we develop our minds, but one where we, more importantly, more vigilantly, tend to the nature of our own hearts.

The final question is intriguing.  Should we fear that which makes the heart beat quickly?  Buddhism seems to suggest this.  To the Buddhist, desire is the cause of pain and therefore should be done away with.  The goal is serenity, lack of desire.

In contrast, the early followers of Jesus, encouraged zeal, to love deeply, to face fear, to hunger for righteousness.  It makes sense to fear our quick-beating hearts.  In those moments, we tend to act instinctively.  We can easily make mistakes, say things we didn't want to say, or find ourselves more eager than normal, to take risks.  But, if we develop in our hearts, values that we share with our Father, and a place of peace that can be carried into those anxious or exciting moments, we can ride the intensity of our hearts into places God would have us and back out of those we know would do our hearts wrong.