When I’m neck-deep in poetry (as I have been the past month or so), I often times will stumble upon a piece of verse that says everything I’m thinking, feeling–a piece of writing that so vividly paints realities I’m currently unable to put to voice.
Whenever that happens my mind stops whatever else it was doing–my multi-tasking mode ceases to function–and my heart begins to race and my skin begins to blush, and I feel like someone is watching me, a stranger who was always there but whom I never noticed before this very moment.
Below are two poems that have moved me so profoundly during the past weeks that I can’t stop reading them, writing them, wondering if it’s indeed possible for poetry to exist so far outside of itself so as to be the exact words someone needs to read at the exact and finite moment they need to read them. (It must be.)
EARTH
It isn’t winter that brings it
out, my cowardice,
but the thickening summer I wallow in
right now, stinking of lilacs, green
with worms & stamens duplicating themselves
each one the same
I squat among rows of seeds & imposters
and snout my hand into the juicy dirt:
charred chicken bones, rusted nails,
dogbones, stones, stove ashes.
Down there is another hand, yours, hopeless,
down there is a future
in which you’re a white white picture
with a name I forgot to write
underneath, and no date,
in which you’re a suit
hanging with its stubs of sleeves
in a cupboard in a house
in a city I’ve never entered,
a missed beat in space
which nevertheless unrolls itself
as usual. As usual:
that’s why I don’t want to go on with this.
(I’ll want to make a hole in the earth
the size of an implosion, a leaf, a dwarf
star, a cave
in time that opens back & back into
absolute darkness and at last
into a small pale moon of light
the size of a hand,
I’ll want to call you out of the grave
in the form of anything at all)
-Margaret Atwood
KINDNESS
Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian ina white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
You must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes any sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your hoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.
-Naomi Shihab Nye