Poem of the Week, by Maggie Smith
Once, at a magic show held at night in a converted barn in rural New Hampshire, I watched a girl gasp in amazement as a happy young man in a cape pulled a rabbit from a hat, and then –somehow– made a bird in a cage disappear from the stage and reappear at the back of the room. Did you see that? the girl said to me. That was amazing. She was fifteen at the time, and I remember thinking how beautiful it was that she could still be captivated by magic. Some years later, from her first job, a year spent at the poorest elementary school in the poorest neighborhood of a big city, a job which taxed her spirit to the limit because of the nearly unimaginable suffering her students lived under, she sent me a text. It was “Atten-Dance” day for the fourth-graders, a day on which all the students with good attendance got to stay after school for a dance put on for them by the girl and her colleagues. This is the best day of the year, her text said. My babies —which is what she, at 22, called her students– are so excited. They’re jumping around like the little kids they for once get to be. Like the poem below says, we can make this place beautiful. Even now.
Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.
For more information about Maggie Smith, please click here.
I am so sorry. Especially to the beautiful young people whom I know and don’t know, I am sorry. To my Muslim and Somali, Hmong and Black and Latina/Latino and Asian and LGBTQ students and friends, I am sorry. To my own children, I am sorry. This country and the world have been in hideous places before now –before the end of slavery, before the beginning of civil rights and women’s right to vote and women’s right to sovereignty over their bodies– but from here on out I am stepping it up. I vow to be as kind as I can, whenever I can. To speak up when I see someone being bullied. To call out the perpetrators when I see acts of racism and sexism. To protect the right to a safe and legal abortion for all the young women who, like me when I was a terrified and birth control-using teenager, make that agonizing decision. To listen, no matter the views of the person speaking, so that I can try to connect in even a tiny way, one human heart to another. To put one foot in front of the other for the next four years and for every year after that to make this world a better place.
Tough choosing a poem this week amidst the hours spent hiking, walking, trying to tromp my way into some form of inner calm. More hours on the couch scrolling through my thousands of poems. Searching for certain poets, the ones who bring me comfort because they’re fearless, because they talk about life the way it is, because they use ordinary words to write about ordinary things that in their magic hands turn transcendent and remind me that I’m not in this alone. That I am never alone. That all over this country right now, there are others waking every morning and breathing in and breathing out and reminding themselves that the world has never been easy, that humankind has always been under threat by the few among us who take pleasure in being cruel, in inciting violence, in tearing apart the social fabric because . . . why? because they can, I guess. Yes, we are always under siege by those who would divide us for their own sick pleasure, and also yes, we are always fighting back. Sometimes with harshness, and sometimes with a book that lasts for a lifetime, as in this beautiful poem.
My dog is sleeping on the couch right now. We can read each other’s minds; before I get up from this table in a few minutes to go for a run, he will already have jumped down and trotted over to me, knowing I’m about to leave. When I return, he will be waiting at the door to greet me. He doesn’t wake up disturbed like me at the daily news, which even though I don’t watch television and I avoid certain headlines, I know anyway. It’s in the air, in the invisible waves that connect us to each other and the world. It’s a battle not to give in to the disgust and despair and cynicism and snark that sometimes feels omnipresent and, weirdly, more socially acceptable than hope. Hope is harder, and so is the steadfast work that makes things better. The dog in this beautiful poem reminds me of my own dog. Not everything is bad, he says, in action if not words.
This poem makes me think of my mother and father, who, from my vantage point, seem to spend most of their time doing good things for others. Need sixty pounds of stuffing for the Octoberfeast? Sure. Need a ride to your dentist appointment sixty miles away? No problem. All-day help in the homeless shelter kitchen every third Wednesday? Of course. A listening ear in a time of sadness? They are there. They are there, they are there, they are there. Some people write checks and then there are the people like my parents, who wade in knee deep to fill the plates and then wash the plates, brew the coffee and then pour the coffee, welcome the new babies, slip a $20 in their graduation cards eighteen years later, and stand in line in dark clothes to say goodbye when the time comes. We are all headed to the same place; may as well name it Jerusalem, or Mecca, or the meaning-of-a-life-whatever-that-may-be, and make those steps count.
When I was eighteen I left the landscape of my childhood –the foothills of the southwestern Adirondacks, in far upstate New York– for college in Vermont, and in all the years since I have never spent more than a week at a time in my homeland, always to visit my parents. You would think I left that world behind, the day I got to college, and in a way that’s true. The horizons of my life blew wide open that day, and they have kept right on opening. But every adult novel I’ve ever written is set in that land, with its maples and oaks that turn to flame in the autumn, pine trees in winter that look black against deep snow that looks blue or white or pink, depending. The people in those novels aren’t real, I conjured them up out of my heart and my head, but I wish they had been around when I was a girl. Maybe I would’ve loved them, maybe they would’ve loved me. When Alan Gillis in this beautiful, dreamlike poem below talks about the girl who sheds the skin of her longing only to escape into more longing, I know in my bones what he means. I guess everyone does.
Alison McGhee 