I’ve been slow to come to poetry, really. For the longest time I often felt I was missing something when I read it, that I needed things to be more obvious, or that I wanted to be sure I understood what was meant. I think this long lasting hesitation or reluctance to embrace and enjoy poetry stemmed from deep unease with uncertainty. But it seems that I have made friends with uncertainty now. We hang out more often and it doesn’t unnerve me quite as much. I think this has made my encounters with poetry easier. Less intimidating, somehow. I’m content to let a poem wash over me, and if a few droplets of wisdom or beauty or serenity or resonance remain on me, I feel lucky, and if not, I’m just content to appreciate the sound of the words as they rush past me. I’m not sure exactly what the reason is, but I find myself reaching for it more and more these days.
My mother loved poetry. There were volumes of poetry everywhere in the house - stacked beside her bed or on her desk, even in the bathroom. There were poems that were published last month or in antiquity or anywhere in between. There were poems from all corners of the world, in English, French, Latin or Greek, or else in translation from other languages she couldn’t read herself. She taught poetry at university, and tried to help me find my way to poetry or nudge me towards it on many occasions, often giving me anthologies that would sit on my shelf, mostly unread. Her biggest effort was in 2006 when she began sending me a poem (or a fragment, if it was a longer poem) on a regular basis. She had recently gone completely deaf and though we lived in the same city we had a notebook we corresponded to each other in, passing it back and forth whenever we had written in it. In honour of poetry month that year, she started sending poems with each instalment.
(I paused to look at some of the poems she shared with me and got sucked in to that correspondence and now it is four days later. This is how it goes with me, I’m afraid.) Here’s one of my favourites from the ones she shared with me then: Heaven-Haven: A Nun Takes the Veil, by Gerard Manley Hopkins.
I’ve already written here about the thoughtful, intuitive friends who text links to things just when you can use them, but I failed to mention the thoughtful, intuitive friends who sent me poetry just when I needed it most. It had been a long time since anyone gifted me any poetry, but last year, dear friends from opposite corners of the continent sent me a care package that included a volume of Maggie Smith’s poetry (Good Bones, hello.) It was just right. Another friend sent me an email with Wendell Berry’s The Peace of Wild Things sitting quietly at the bottom of the message. I started a word document on my desktop where I would copy and paste poems that I could go back to when I needed. Then I began hanging out a bit more in the 800s (the section of the library’s non-fiction collection where you’ll find poetry, if you’re in a library that uses the Dewey Decimal System). I stumbled on to a beautiful collection called 100 Poems to Break Your Heart by Edward Hirsch. Sometimes you open up such a book and find just the line you need to see. Take this one, for instance, from Wisława Szymborska’s poem “Under One Small Star” (1972):
Forgive me, distant wars, for bringing flowers home.
I needed that.
I needed Crossing, by Jericho Brown too.
Most recently, I have been finding solace in John O’Donohue’s poetry, as well as his book of blessings, which really are like poems. I find myself revisiting his blessing “For Courage” quite often.
Do you have any poetry you turn to on a regular basis? What poems help you keep going? I’d love to know.
Sending love,
Rebecca
Oooh- I found Under one Small Star very “relatable”. Thank you. And speaking of Mama, would she have approved of the current usage of relatable???