Your Poetry Fix: Words For Burning Times
Can poetry save us, after all?
HI
The truth: I started writing this post on January 7th, the same day I took a long-planned flight to Los Angeles for work, the same day the city burst into flames. By the time the plane was midway between Maui and California, I knew that entire sections of the Pacific Coast Highway near Topanga Canyon, my once-home, had burned. Restaurants and feed shops dematerialized, precious places literally up in smoke. On the ground, the air was acrid, a permeating wrongness of chemicals clogging the sky.
After far too little sleep, I gratefully and safely evacuated with friends. For days, sleep was scarce. I was hyper-vigilant, checking fire perimeter maps, texting friends whose houses might be gone, or already were. The memory of all the times I’ve evacuated hummed at my ribcage. The imprint of the fires in Lahaina and Olinda and Kula—just a year and a half ago—clutching at my throat.
I wanted to write to you. To send you poetry. To share these poems I’d already recorded for the new year. But in the wake of so much loss, I felt strange sending anything out. So many were suffering, homes vaporized, earth sanctuaries torched.
And then came the all-consuming-if-you-let-it-be sweep of this political moment.
Again, I thought: Who needs poetry now? Poetry won’t save us. And in some ways, it’s true: Poetry may not put out wildfires or make untrue the horrors of any given day. But it has saved me. Again and again.
Poetry saves me when my heart is shattered by romantic disappointment or political despair. When I am sodden with grief. When I don’t have the words. The poem offers a container for hopelessness and gives dimension to hope. It reminds me I am never alone.
It is Rilke’s no feeling is final. The gathering of wisdom in even the sparest lines reminds me that this is neither the end nor the beginning of my story. Instead, the poem is an assertion that the feelings moving through my heart-mind are part of a web of interconnected stories. Part of your story, your heart-mind. Our joint attention to and resonance with a poem means that we get to take care of each other even as we take care of ourselves.
In this way, for me, poetry has always mirrored truth. And truth is often something like salvation.
So today I’m sharing the poems I selected for you back at the start of the year. A double-header: One for letting go, one for looking ahead. I hope their interplay sets a little light ablaze in you. Transcriptions of both poems follow the recording.
And yes, I did select this first poem (Naomi Shihab Nye’s “Burning the Old Year”) before the fires. I know.
I’ll write more soon, but for now: A moment to be gentle. Maybe poetry can save us. Just for today.
Ready? Press play.