Editor’s Note: These days, it’s hard not to feel like the speaker in this poem. There is a great “perturbation” in the air, to use one of poet Stanley Kunitz’s favorite words. We will get through it, as we always have. In the meantime, try to get some sleep.
There Was a Great Want of Civility
All night in the trees,
the whispering,
a great disorder, not the way
leaves talk among themselves
during the day, not the rustle
of squirrels and birds among them,
but a tossing, shiftless shadow
weight of darkness,
leaf to leaf.
I dared not close my eyes
for fear it would have
its way with me.
How
could anyone sleep?
Julie Suarez is retired from Hartwick College where she was an assistant professor of English for 34 years. Her poems have appeared in Salmagundi, Phoebe, Women’s Voices of the 20th Century, La Presa, The Traveller’s Vade Mecum, The New York Times Magazine, Plant Human Quarterly, and others. Her chapbook, It Does Not, was published by Bright Hill Press in 2006. In addition to writing poems, she also sings with the Catskill Choral Society and gardens. This poem was published first in The Traveler’s Vade Mecum (Red Hen Press, 2016), and then, in the New York Times Magazine (February 5, 2017, p.17). It is posted here with the author’s permission.
0 Responses
I would love to see a program designed to help us learn to talk to each other and solve problems, rather than stand on different sides of an imaginary line and scream at each other.
There are programs like this. one of which is Better Angels, based on Lincoln’s first inaugural address: “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.” I wish we had such wisdom nowadays.
There are so many programs, techniques, methods and countless books offering tools for problem solving; but… fear and self-loathing are such painful and deeply interior states that many are more comfortable with the more outward facing “feeling” of anger. Sometimes only poetry, or some other form of grace, can touch this space.
With the greater part of media/marketing/technology/politicos conspiring to feed and fuel these negative emotions, it requires an enormous act of strength, courage, and, ultimately, great good fortune, to reclaim our personal, as well as collective, sense of power and agency. You cannot waken one who pretends to be asleep.
Poetry is, indeed, one of those safe meeting places where people of differing opinions and world views can rest safely for a moment. I wish the magic of poetry could spill over into our public lives. Not sure why differing opinions feel so threatening and dangerous to some. I read once that one’s political opinions are grounded in one’s world view and that no amount of fact throwing or data will change that because one’s world view arises from emotion, not intellect. So, first we need to feel safe with each other, walk in each other’s shoes, and then, perhaps, we can share our beliefs. Easy to say; much harder to do.