#231: Poetry on fragility and brokenness

Apr 24, 2023

Hello!

I’m sending you all warm light on this Monday night. May your body’s melatonin kick in and may you find rest and deep REM sleep tonight. There’s a lot going on on the work front these days, so I don’t have much to share in this week’s newsletter. Sigh.

So in an attempt to not burn out, I’ll keep this week’s newsletter short and sharp with some tender and hard-hitting poems.

Poetry Corner

1. The Unbroken by Rashani Rea

There is a brokenness
out of which comes the unbroken,
a shatteredness
out of which blooms the unshatterable.
There is a sorrow
beyond all grief which leads to joy
and a fragility
out of whose depths emerges strength.
There is a hollow space too vast for words
through which we pass with each loss,
out of whose darkness we are sanctioned into being.
There is a cry deeper than all sound
whose serrated edges cut the heart
as we break open
to the place inside which is unbreakable
and whole
while learning to sing.

2. I Dreamed Again by Anne Michaels

I dreamed again you were alive, and woke
certain it was your voice —
love is whisky, it is milk,
it is water don’t ever, you said in the dream,
think I’ve gone

I woke a little more, a moment or two,
then remembered. Memory makes it so. Keeps you
under the trees.

So I did not turn on the lamp
but lay until I felt again your warmth with mine
heard your voice in my hair

I lay there a long time,
forgetting

3. My Worries Have Worries by Laura Villareal

so I built little matchstick houses
with large ceilings, a garden for them to grow

tomatoes, cilantro, & carrots
their worry babies will eat

but they chew on the henbit of me anyway
both my past & future entwined into disasters

I tell them I worry about their health
that they’re not eating properly

I mother them
the way I do anyone I love

they ask if I love myself
I tug the sleeves of my sweater

begin thatching a leaking roof
water their garden
at night

I can hear them
dancing around a bonfire

all I’ve built burned
down, a soot snowfall

tomorrow they’ll wait for me
& I’ll reconstruct their home
anyone would do the same

4. Clam by Mary Oliver

Each one is a small life, but sometimes long, if its
place in the universe is not found out. Like us, they
have a heart and a stomach; they know hunger, and
probably a little satisfaction too. Do not mock them
for their gentleness, they have a muscle that loves
being alive. They pull away from the light. They pull
down. They hold themselves together. They refuse to
open.

But sometimes they lose their place and are tumbled
shoreward in a storm. Then they pant, they fill
with sand, they have no choice but must open the
smallest crack. Then the fire of the world touches
them. Perhaps, on such days, they too begin the
terrible effort of thinking, of wondering who, and
what, and why. If they can bury themselves again in
the sand they will. If not, they are sure to perish,
though not quickly. They also have resources beyond
the flesh; they also try very hard not to die.

5. Because These Failures Are My Job by Alison Luterman

This morning I failed to notice the pearl-gray moment
just before sunrise when everything lightens;
failed also to find bird song under the grinding of garbage trucks,
and later, walking through woods, to stop thinking, thinking,
for even five consecutive steps. Then there was the failure to name
the exact shade of blue overhead, not sapphire, not azure, not delft,
to savor the soft squelch of pine needles underfoot.
Later I found the fork raised halfway to my mouth
while I was still chewing the last untasted bite,
and so it went, until finally, wading into sleep’s thick undertow,
I felt myself drift from dream to dream,
forever failing to comprehend where I am falling from or to:
this blurred life with only moments caught
in attention’s loose sieve —
tiny pearls fished out of oblivion’s sea,
laid out here as offering or apology or thank you

6. Self-Portrait With Woman On The Subway by Hayan Charara

Across from me she
was crying badly, everyone
around her looking
into their laps trying
to pretend they did not notice.
So unashamed
in her grief she wept
like the N line
was a room in her apartment
and the afternoon
would last forever.
Twenty years on,
I could’ve said something,
anything—
“The red of your scarf
is beautiful.”

7. The Ground by Caroline Bird

You land on a ridge, six-feet down the cliff
and believe you have fallen from the dread
summit and survived, you think,
this is the ground.
until you notice the larks passing at eye level,
drop a cufflink and fall
fifty-feet into the open palm of another ridge,
deeper in, scratched, clothes torn,
you've lost a shoe but you think
this is the ground,
I can bake that lasagne now
till a kite gets snagged in your hair,
your feet meet a plunging carpet
now you're hanging by your necklace
from a branch thinking
this is the ground,
let's buy a puppy
as you sit in your bracken chair,
as you fall in your chair like a lopped flower head
face-planting — Yes! Ground! — in a tree,
wind-burnt from momentum, whip-
lashed by your own screams, oops, then oops,
oops, straddling a lamppost, a pillar, a shed, each time
you've survived, falling, landing, falling out,
who knows how long you've been travelling
down this thing, incrementally, held in the loosening-
tightening fist of a giant with a featureless face.
Thud. At last
I can put up that shelf. Make that baby.
You lie and let your bones heal, looking up
at the distance, experiencing plateau
for the first time, cold, hard, real, the opposite
of air. You shake like a prodigal astronaut.
I could build a house on this, you think,
staggering off.

8. Final Lesson in First Philosophy by Dan Beachy-Quick

The sun brightens the clouds before it breaks
them apart. On the far side of the ocean
there are marble ruins of the broken
temples: the temple each cloud is. Ruin
is faith's consequence—to house the force
that tears the house apart. The sun is
the yellow shield buckled on to the throat
of the sun-throated warbler—it says
with no words song's unspeakable fact.
Silence is faith's consequence—a world of
knowing that knowing is a world of not.
The book called The Sun held a fact one could love
but have no faith in. Close the book. Think,
thinker, in the dark. Moon—quiet the lark.

Praying for rain + more time and energy in life,
Rohini

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