A poem you already know

 

Thank you, beloveds who called and texted and messaged on Friday and Saturday. There was some breath holding, some sinking into grief. I’m sorry if my responses were slow. My mother was here in the States, but there was a very close person caught in the hostage situation. He made it out alive, but so many people did not. The more details emerge, the less sense anything makes. Where does that stomach for cruelty, that ability to have a complete disregard for human life come from? Where is this hate being manufactured, and how? I have believed fully, for my entire life, that people are basically good. But maybe that’s my own willful blindness. But you don’t come here to hear my grief over the news of the world. You come here to read a poem, to write a poem. 

Saturday morning I ran into a friend who recommended that I listen to the episode of the podcast “On Being” in which the guest is poet David Whyte. This is a relatively new friend, who has thus far never steered me wrong with recommendations of this sort–total keeper. So I went home and listened to it. You can listen here. As soon as I was done listening I did three things: 1. Wrote the line “Anything or anyone that doesn’t make you more alive is too small for you” on my window in dry erase marker, 2. Ordered Whyte’s book “Consolations” and 3. Sent the link to a bunch of people I love.

Because the Internet is a Holy web of Convenient Magic, the book arrived Sunday. SUNDAY. And I was able to do some reading and writing from it so I could use it in groups this week. Here’s the table of contents:

Each of these words is the entry into a short essay about the word. In some places, I found something off-putting and preachy about the tone, but that could be my own shit working itself out. Here’s an excerpt from “Regret”:

Sincere regret may in fact be a faculty for paying attention to the future, for sensing a new tide where we missed a previous one, for experiencing timelessness with a grandchild where we neglected a boy of our own. To regret fully is to appreciate how high the stakes are in even the average human life. Fully experienced, regret turns our eyes, attentive and alert to a future possibly lived better than our past.

 And from “Beginning”:

Beginning is difficult, and our procrastination is a fine ever-present measure of our reluctance in taking that first close-in, courageous step to reclaiming our happiness. Perhaps, because taking a new step always leads to a kind of radical internal simplification, where, suddenly, very large parts of us, parts of us still rehearsing the old complicated story, are suddenly out of a job.

See? SO good. The thing to recognize is that this is one (very wise) guy’s take on these very universal experiences. To read them and sigh along or agree is one thing. But to have our minds changed, we have to write. With the same sort of confidence and entitlement to opinion that the old guys have. Here’s a poem by an old guy who was in the know and knew it. Write your own, write with confidence. Of course your line is “This is what you shall do:…” 

You have a responsibility to think about these things. We all do. 20 minutes. Hold the people you love close. It’s the only thing to do that makes any sense.

Preface to Leaves of Grass

by Walt Whitman

This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.