I can't sleep…
this life gives us only so many hours
to share & how we share, i worry,
is wasteful-Sunday night & the tv on,
so we don’t look at each other.
on screen some reality tv stars
threaten to choke each other out.
my love, we are bad television,
happy as we are to hold hands
& eat greasy pizza together
during these small breaths
before Monday arrives like a fist.
— Josè Olivarez, “Sunday Love” in “Promises of Gold” (Henry Holt & Company, February 14, 2023) (via Alive on All Channels)
“In the dream, a man had cut down our fifty-year-old pistachio tree, Leila’s and my tree. In the dream, we had a pistachio tree. Fifty years old. That alone.
And so we were deciding what to do with this man, what his just punishment should be. I said something stupid about him owing us a year’s pistachio harvest, the cost of the tree. And then Leila said, in English:
“I do not care about the pistachios, Roya jaan. I do not care about the tree. He owes us the fifty years of sun, fifty years of water inside that tree. Fifty years of sun and water. That is the price.”
She said it in English. I woke screaming. English, fifty years of sun. I wept for a week. Separation from what you love best, that is hell. To be twice separated, first by a nation and then by its language: that is pain deeper than pain. Deeper than hell. That is abyss.”
— Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!: A Novel (Knopf, January 23, 2024)
Notes:
“Cyrus also worried that the whole idea of gratitude was possibly classist, or worse. Did a poor Syrian child, whose living and dying had been indelibly shaped by the murderous whims of evil men, qualify for grace only if she possessed a superhuman ability to look beyond her hardship and notice the beauty of a single flower growing through a pile of rubble? And would the gratitude for that flower be contaminated by the awareness, or ignorance, of the bodies turning to soil beneath it?
And then, if the girl herself was rubbled by an errant mortar shell, her eyes full of tears and aimed in their final living moment at that flower, which would weigh more on the cosmic scales: a tear of gratitude at the great beauty of a flower lifting through ash, or a tear of delirious rage?
It’s possible, he thought, that the experience of gratitude was itself a luxury, a topless convertible driven through a rainless life. Even the platitudes offered after a tragedy—a divorce, a dead pet—seemed built around the expectation that gratitude was a base level to which you returned after passing through some requisite interval of grief: “In time, you’ll remember only the joy.” People really said that, people who, like Cyrus, could reasonably expect that sufficient training of the spirit would reveal a near-infinite supply of gratitudes hidden in every leaf and sound and mortarless sky.”
— Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!: A Novel (Knopf, January 23, 2024)
Notes:
I turned to literature like a maniac. I mean, I was – I just was reading, you know, five hours a day and memorizing all these things and convinced that nothing mattered but being a great poet, and, yeah, that’s what filled the void for 20 years. I mean, I – well, it never did it, but it certainly – I certainly tried to make it fill that void. […]
I have this hunger in me that is endless, and I think everyone probably has it. Maybe they find different ways of dealing with it, whether it’s booze or excessive exercise or excessive art or whatever. I tried to answer it with poetry for years and hit a wall with that. And finally, I decided, or rather – I didn’t decide. That’s not right. I discovered that the only answer to that hunger was God. Answer is wrong, I guess. The only solution to me was to live toward God without an answer. […]
GROSS: So – but what was your understanding of God then?
WIMAN: Well, I probably did have an understanding of God as a person in the sky, you know, or a vision of God as simply the answer to all questions, and also just a being a, like a father figure. And I suffered a real loss of that concept at some point, and to what I have now, which is God is really not an object at all, but a verb.
(GROSS: Why turn to religion and not, say, for instance, philosophy? What did religion – what did faith give you that you felt nothing else could?) […]
Oh, a living God. I mean, as philosophy, there’s nothing that loves you back. I mean, I am moved by my deepest settled belief is in the unity of existence, that there is some fundamental unity in all things. And we are part of that. And in our deepest experiences of joy or of love or suffering, there is a sense sometimes that reality is looking back at us. And it can happen to people who are not religious at all. It happens to poets all the time. They can have an experience in nature in which they’re not blending with nature. It’s as if there’s some kind of reciprocal seeing. And I think that is God. And that’s the leap that I made in my life. I think a lot of people don’t make that leap and perhaps don’t feel the need to make that leap.
— Christian Wiman, excerpts from ‘After 18 years living with cancer, a poet offers ‘Fifty Entries Against Despair‘ (NPR Interview with Terry Gross, December 13, 2023) Christian Wiman’s new book is called “Zero At The Bone: 50 Entries Against Despair.” He teaches at Yale Divinity School and the Yale School of Sacred Music.
Notes: Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.
When the night slides under with the last dimming star
and the red sky lightens between the trees,
and the heron glides tipping heavy wings in the river,
when crows stir and cry out their harsh joy,
and swift creatures of the night run toward their burrows,
and the deer raises her head and sniffs the freshening air,
and the shadows grow more distinct and then shorten,
then we rise into the day still clean as new snow.
The cat washes its paw and greets the day with gratitude.
Every day we find a new sky and a new earth
with which we are trusted like a perfect toy…
We are given the wind within us, the breath
to shape into words that steal time…
Yet holy breath still stretches our lungs to sing.
We are lent for a time these minerals in water
and a morning every day, a morning to wake up,
rejoice and praise life in our spines, our throats,
our knees, our genitals, our brains, our tongues…
We are given passion to rise
like the sun in our minds with the new day
and burn the debris of habit and greed and fear.
We stand in the midst of the burning world
primed to burn with compassionate love and justice,
to turn inward and find holy fire at the core,
to turn outward and see the world that is all
of one flesh with us, see under the trash, through
the smog, the furry bee in the apple blossom,
the trout leaping, the candles our ancestors lit for us…
Let silence still us so you may show us your shining
and we can out of that stillness rise and praise.
~ Marge Piercy, from “Nishmat in “Available Light
Notes: Poem – Thank you Beth @ Alive on All Channels. Photo: Marta Navarro