Poets show us how to do what we must
Our hopes are reborn in spring, and as winter’s cold winds morph into April’s warming breezes, we may experience a quickening of our pulses, a lightening of our steps. But have no doubt: We’re aware of the preceding dark months through which we’ve suffered, of the myriad sorrows our nation’s endured during our still ongoing pandemic, with its attendant economic and social upheavals and our personal losses.
But humans are deeply resilient beings, and Californians are particularly adept at dealing with sudden perils and localized crises, whether freeway accidents, wildfires or power outages. Yet, despite weathering hard times, we still turn toward the horizon with hope.
Throughout history, poets have shown us how to do what we must: face adversity, recover, persevere and move forward. Take, for example, this eloquent haiku by the great 18th century Japanese poet Kobayashi Issa:
“Climb Mount Fuji O snail but slowly, slowly.” Progress and healing take time and require strength, endurance and patience. Moving along our separate paths, we may retreat, but then square our shoulders and meet adversity again, head-on. Surprisingly, dangerous times and fearful circumstances may lead to sudden insights, as in this ancient Inuit song narrated by a fisherman adrift on frozen waters:
“And I thought over again
My small adventures
As with a shorewind I drifted out In my kayak
And thought I was in danger, My fears,
Those small ones
That I thought so big
For all the vital things I had to get and to reach.
And, yet, there is only One great thing,
The only thing:
To live to see in huts and on journeys
The great day that dawns,
And the light that fills the world.”
Roman poet Horace also realized the importance of savoring each day’s golden moments: carpe diem, seize the day, he said.
In another poem, African American poet Lucille Clifton, who raised six children and knew hardship intimately, claims that self-possession and resolve helped her to endure life’s misfortunes: “won’t you celebrate with me, what i have shaped into a kind of life? i had no model. born in Babylon both nonwhite and woman what did i see to be except myself? i made it up here on this bridge between starshine and clay, my one hand holding tight my other hand; come celebrate with me that everyday something has tried to kill me and has failed.”
After every cataclysmic event in our country’s history, and amid ongoing social struggles, American poets have responded with honesty and conviction, sometimes consoling us, or calling us to action, or at other times urging us to heal. After 9/11, our poets expressed an outpouring of anger and grief, and a moving poem marking that tragic occasion is “September 12, 2001,” a brief testimonial by X.J. Kennedy:
“Two caught on film who hurtle
from the eighty-second floor,
choosing between a fireball
and to jump holding hands,
aren’t us. I wake beside you,
stretch, scratch, taste the air,
the incredible joy of coffee and the morning light. Alive, we open eyelids on our pitiful share of time,
we bubbles rising and bursting in a boiling pot.”
Our safety and quotidian joy may be fleeting, Kennedy suggests, but they buoy us temporarily, despite the dangerous world we inhabit.
President Biden has called our current efforts battling the coronavirus a “war,” bringing to mind “The War in the Air,” an elegy by World War II Army Air Force pilot Howard Nemerov commemorating the death of unseen thousands:
“For a saving grace, we didn’t see our dead,
Who rarely bothered coming home to die
But simply stayed away out there
In the clean war, the war in the air.
Seldom the ghosts came back bearing their tales
Of hitting the earth, the incompressible sea,
But stayed up there in the relative wind,
Shades fading in the mind,
Who had no graves but only epitaphs
Where never so many spoke for never so few:
Per ardua, said the partisans of Mars,
Per aspera, to the stars. That was the good war, the war we won
As if there were no death, for goodness’ sake,
With the help of the losers we left out there
In the air, in the empty air.”
How do we honor those half-million “ghosts” — our fellow Americans — who couldn’t come home to die during the pandemic? Nemerov’s poem recalls the terrible toll all wars take, both for those who’ve perished and those left behind.
The plight of immigrants surging across our border to seek better lives brings to mind “Iraqi Nights,” a poignant poem by Iraqi-American poet Dunya Mikhail:
“We cross borders lightly like clouds.
Nothing carries us but as we move on we carry rain, and an accent, and a memory of another place.” Although haunted by those we’ve lost, the places we’ve left behind and past traumas, our spirits will rise again. “Hope is the thing with feathers,” Emily Dickinson reminds us, a powerful mantra for spring.