Saturday, November 12, 2016

Saturday Poetry



Since the election, I wake up every morning in dread.




Poem

I lived in the first century of world wars.
Most mornings I would be more or less
insane,
The newspapers would arrive with their
careless stories,
The news would pour out of various
devices
Interrupted by attempts to sell products
to the unseen.
I would call my friends on other devices;
They would be more or less mad for
similar reasons.
Slowly I would get to pen and paper,
Make my poems for others unseen and
unborn.
In the day I would be reminded of those
men and women,
Brave, setting up signals across vast
distances,
Considering a nameless way of living, of
almost unimagined values.
As the lights darkened, as the lights of
night brightened,
We would try to imagine them, try to find
each other,
To construct peace, to make love, to
reconcile
Waking with sleeping, ourselves with each
other,
Ourselves with ourselves. We would try by
any means
To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach
beyond ourselves,
To let go the means, to wake.


I lived in the first century of these wars.

Muriel Rukeyser
from The Speed of Darkness, 1968
posted on Poetry Foundation

5 comments:

  1. I don't know what to say.
    It all still really, really sucks.
    Dread. Despair. Depression.
    D words.

    ReplyDelete
  2. What an incredibly perfect poem for these times. How prescient she was. Or has the world changed so little? I confess I had thought we were further along. And perhaps we are, all evidence to the contrary. Hugs, dear friend.

    ReplyDelete
  3. That photo, the essence of impending doom. One of the things that keeps me in this mind-swirling shock is the realization that things have just barely begun. Just now, at the very edge of beginning we are seeing things we never thought we'd see again. The expanse of 4 years seems like a century. I eat up the women's march, the electoral petition, the safety pin and the night time protests. I want the mountain to keep rising and I'll keep placing little stone after little stone on it until it crushes all of this craziness.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I wish I had words for you, Elizabeth. Don't forget to breathe.

    ReplyDelete
  5. I also want you to know, Elizabeth, that I never loose sight of how frighten this is for you and Sophie and your little family - and all the families in your community - I think of you everyday. " Who against hope believed in hope", we do.

    ReplyDelete

LinkWithin

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...