Tear it Down | Jack Gilbert

We find out the heart only by dismantling what the heart knows. By redefining the morning, we find a morning that comes just after darkness. We can break through marriage into marriage. By insisting on love we spoil it, get beyond affection and wade mouth-deep into love. We must unlearn the constellations to see the stars. But going back toward childhood will not help. The village is not better than Pittsburgh. Only Pittsburgh is more than Pittsburgh. Rome is better than Rome in the same way the sound of racoon tongues licking the inside walls of the garbage tub is more than the stir of them in the muck of the garbage. Love is not enough. We die and are put into the earth forever. We should insist while there is still time. We must eat through the wildness of her sweet body already in our bed to reach the body within the body.

KINDNESS by Naomi Shihab Nye

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 in a 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 sense anymore, only kindness that ties your shoes 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.

MIMESIS

My daughter wouldn’t hurt a spider That had nested Between her bicycle handles For two weeks She waited Until it left of its own accord If you tear down the web I said It will simply know This isn’t a place to call home And you would get to go biking She said that’s how others Become refugees isn’t it? ~Fady Joudah, “Mimesis”

For Women Who Are 'Difficult' to Love by Warsan Shire

 

You are a horse running alone

and he tries to tame you

compares you to an impossible highway

to a burning house

says you are blinding him

that he could never leave you

forget you

want anything but you

you dizzy him, you are unbearable

every woman before or after you

is doused in your name

you fill his mouth

his teeth ache with memory of taste

his body just a long shadow seeking yours

but you are always too intense

frightening in the way you want him

unashamed and sacrificial

he tells you that no man can live up to the one who

lives in your head

and you tried to change didn't you?

closed your mouth more

tried to be softer

prettier

less volatile, less awake

but even when sleeping you could feel

him travelling away from you in his dreams

so what did you want to do love

split his head open?

you can't make homes out of human beings

someone should have already told you that

and if he wants to leave

then let him leave

you are terrifying

and strange and beautiful

something not everyone knows how to love.

--Warsan Shire

Enlightenment BY NATASHA TRETHEWEY

 

In the portrait of Jefferson that hangs

        at Monticello, he is rendered two-toned:

his forehead white with illumination —

a lit bulb — the rest of his face in shadow,

        darkened as if the artist meant to contrast

his bright knowledge, its dark subtext.

By 1805, when Jefferson sat for the portrait,

        he was already linked to an affair

with his slave. Against a backdrop, blue

and ethereal, a wash of paint that seems

        to hold him in relief, Jefferson gazes out

across the centuries, his lips fixed as if

he's just uttered some final word.

        The first time I saw the painting, I listened

as my father explained the contradictions:

 

how Jefferson hated slavery, though — out

        of necessity, my father said — had to own

slaves; that his moral philosophy meant

 

he could not have fathered those children:

        would have been impossible, my father said.

For years we debated the distance between

word and deed. I'd follow my father from book

        to book, gathering citations, listening

as he named — like a field guide to Virginia —

each flower and tree and bird as if to prove

        a man's pursuit of knowledge is greater

than his shortcomings, the limits of his vision.

I did not know then the subtext

        of our story, that my father could imagine

Jefferson's words made flesh in my flesh —

 

the improvement of the blacks in body

        and mind, in the first instance of their mixture

with the whites — or that my father could believe

he'd made me better. When I think of this now,

        I see how the past holds us captive,

its beautiful ruin etched on the mind's eye:

my young father, a rough outline of the old man

        he's become, needing to show me

the better measure of his heart, an equation

writ large at Monticello. That was years ago.

        Now, we take in how much has changed:

talk of Sally Hemings, someone asking,

How white was she? — parsing the fractions

        as if to name what made her worthy 

of Jefferson's attentions: a near-white,

quadroon mistress, not a plain black slave.

        Imagine stepping back into the past, 

our guide tells us then — and I can't resist

whispering to my father: This is where

        we split up. I'll head around to the back. 

When he laughs, I know he's grateful

I've made a joke of it, this history

        that links us — white father, black daughter —

even as it renders us other to each other.

Natasha Trethewey, "Enlightenment" from Thrall. Copyright © 2012 by Natasha Trethewey.  Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

‘RETURN’ AND ‘SILENT’ by Elizabeth Gibson

Return

 

I don’t know how we go on, some nights, how I live –

I get antsy and want to walk to the ends of the earth

to save trees and turtles, wear the same jeans and shirt,

go barefoot and vegan: it all seems easy pared down

to a sky of doom and all of this life ending and aching.

 

There is a romance in fighting, a purity in resistance,

a loss that for once feels right and good and survivable,

as your gold rings and silver bangles slip off and away.

Just me and the wonderful, wise woman you will be,

our life given to service, nothing left over when we go.

 

And yet the city is always dark and cold and too fast

and you never come, or else you don’t stay long enough

for me to ask the question, or maybe I am just too weak.

I keep buying, books and chocolates and shower gels,

keep using my heater to desperately warm up my bed.

 

I earnt my money. This is the best time of your life,

I was told by an ex of sorts, when you finish studying.

I had a honeymoon winter when I felt it, I really did,

would spend my evenings alone in Italian restaurants,

trying every dessert, thinking: surely this is happiness.

 

Then the little rebel in me who grew up with folk music

and a mother who spent her time on the campaign trail,

who wanted to save every fly and spider and little bird,

she tasted something in the air and she woke, stretched,

felt truth welcome her back and caress her like a lover.

 

 

---

 

Silent

 

“Unlike other big cats, snow leopards cannot roar.” – WWF website

 

I made you silent, leopard, and I wonder whether to regret it.

Yet when you run grey in grey, silver in silver, silence into

silence, I wonder whether all I made should have been mute.

*To roar does not occur until you suggest it. I have no need*

 

I made them speaking, shouting: negotiating hunts, industry.

Their capacity for language soon gave way to noise, melting

away your quiet land, pulling the snow from under your feet.

*The sounds of the mountains are sufficient. Listen, function*

 

You do not talk, my leopard – does that mean you do not feel?

Physically you can writhe as your skin is stripped but mentally

do you hurt? Do you think, articulate to yourself anger, grief?

*I do not know. I know heat, cold, hunger, exhaustion. Need*

 

If all you do comes from instinct, pure survival your compass,

is that sweeter, better? Perhaps I should have made them like

that: no dreams or desire, laziness or love, greed or gratitude.

*They climb here. They huddle in pairs, display dependency*

 

Maybe then this earth ball would not be burning and crumbling

into itself, decaying, as their passion turns them to destruction.

Maybe they could live quietly, doing the necessary to continue.

*Some chase us, others just observe the view, eyes snowing*

 

But as you hurtle across the silver, impatient to get back, drop

down, hold out your rabbit offering to smaller versions of you,

I think maybe you do feel – that silently, harmlessly, you love.

*Their life outweighs mine. I do not know what that is called*

*****

KEEPING QUIET by Pablo Neruda

Now we will count to twelve

and we will all keep still.

For once on the face of the earth,
let’s not speak in any language;
let’s stop for one second,
and not move our arms so much.

It would be an exotic moment
without rush, without engines;
we would all be together
in a sudden strangeness.

Fisherman in the cold sea
would not harm whales
and the man gathering salt
would look at his hurt hands.

Those who prepare green wars,
wars with gas, wars with fire,
victories with no survivors,
would put on clean clothes
and walk about with their brothers
in the shade, doing nothing.

What I want should not be confused
with total inactivity.
Life is what it is about;
I want no truck with death.

If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with death.
Perhaps the earth can teach us
as when everything seems dead
and later proves to be alive.

Now I’ll count up to twelve
and you keep quiet and I will go.