Sweetness & Its Source

Tonight I’m doing two of my favorite things–eating a delicious dinner with fantastic people and leading a writing workshop with unsuspecting participants. It’s a stacked day, it will be my fourth writing workshop of the day. That is a sweetness I almost cannot believe. There are a few tickets left, please join us at the George Khoury Dinner Club.

My emotions around my firstborn leaving home are put into perspective by what is happening in our country right now. The children being separated from their parents by our government in our name. It is overwhelming to imagine the pain of these separations–and the deep fissures the pain will create in the psyches of these children and their families. To have to leave home because home is unsafe, or because you are hungry and arrive in a place full of people whose own forefathers arrived similarly and receive inhumane treatment. Oh to have the short memory of people in a position of power. I don’t understand why there is even a question here. Are you more loyal to your party than to your humanity? But you already know this. Even if you’re on facebook arguing that “these people broke the law” I know you know better. I know because you break laws when it suits you. We all do.

Today’s poem is Sweetness by Stephen Dunn. I needed to reread this a lot of times this week, to make sense of the sweetness of my life against the stark darkness of the world we live in. I can’t quite reconcile the two, but acknowledging it goes a long way. Much love, and I hope to see you tonight.

SWEETNESS

BY STEPHEN DUNN

Just when it has seemed I couldn’t bear
one more friend
waking with a tumor, one more maniac

with a perfect reason, often a sweetness
has come
and changed nothing in the world

except the way I stumbled through it,
for a while lost
in the ignorance of loving

someone or something, the world shrunk
to mouth-size,
hand-size, and never seeming small.

I acknowledge there is no sweetness
that doesn’t leave a stain,
no sweetness that’s ever sufficiently sweet ….

Tonight a friend called to say his lover
was killed in a car
he was driving. His voice was low

and guttural, he repeated what he needed
to repeat, and I repeated
the one or two words we have for such grief

until we were speaking only in tones.
Often a sweetness comes
as if on loan, stays just long enough

to make sense of what it means to be alive,
then returns to its dark
source. As for me, I don’t care

where it’s been, or what bitter road
it’s traveled
to come so far, to taste so good.

Stephen Dunn, like so many great poets and thinkers, recognizes that light is made brighter by darkness. Here he acknowledges and wrestles with the fact that terrible things happen all the time-which we of course, all know. It’s part of living on this planet. But Dunn mentions these things as facts of life and focuses on the question of sweetness-how it comes anyway, how it is made sweeter in fact by the difficult things that it provides a respite from. And he suggests that it too, comes from a dark source, or rather that the source of all of this is one. What moments of sweetness take you by surprise?