The Sacred Spirituality Quotes

So, this is the first time the speaker mentions something sacred. And it's a place. We don't know where, but we can tell the poem is talking about a personal space. The teacher has asked the students if any of them have "a" sacred place. Note the teacher doesn't ask what a sacred place is; rather, he asks what is a sacred place that is unique for each student.

We also like to think this poem knows it's a poem, even if it's being coy about it. This line reads like a street sign that says, "Look, right here: a sacred place." The poem can be the sacred place for language, or for the speaker.

This is also the first of a series of indented lines. They all appear in the middle of the three-line stanzas, so this line is like the meat of the sacred spiritual sammie that Dunn is putting together for us so we can get a little sacred nourishment, even while reading.

Raise your hand if your first thought of a sacred place is being alone in your car and listening to music? It doesn't seem like the kind of traditional setting for something sacred to happen, but for the student in this poem, it obviously is. How do we know? Because he says so, that's why. More than that, this is also the first instance where Dunn links the idea of the sacred to an isolated a place, a place in motion, a personal place, and something ordinary and mundane, like driving. So this is where the rubber hits the road so to speak, and what Dunn is trying to get at—that sense of the sacred in everyday life—really begins to open up.

We gotta throw this in because Dunn's dropping "the truth," which is one of those big words like "beauty" and "love." But what's it mean? What's the truth? Dunn doesn't wait around to quibble about aesthetics or literary theory. Instead, he briefly mentions that the other students "knew" that what they'd heard was true and resonated with them, and it opened them up so they could begin searching and thinking about their personal sacred place. That's one thing that the poem must be after… how to speak about something openly and honestly that is personal and universal at once. Just like the serious student's statement that his car is sacred, this poem is trying to capture that experience of the sacred that the teacher is asking about. It's as if the speaker of this poem is saying that, for me, poetry, the stanzas, and the music of language make up my car, where I can experience something spiritual.