Five years ago a friend died, a Marine combat veteran, and in his honor and as noted in his obituary, I made a donation to the Wounded Warrior project, which triggered letter after letter from conservative mailing lists. Given my political leanings, it would have been easy to post those letters with a snarky comment and watch the equally snarky responses roll in, but that would only have made things worse.

Most people are not zealots. You can be a pacifist and still support veterans. You can be an atheist and still respect your neighbor’s need to pray to a God you don’t believe in. You can have deep qualms about abortion and still support the right to have one. You can despise your uncle’s homophobic comments and cut off contact with him, or you can remember how he taught you to ride a bike and showed up at all your basketball games. You can choose to open a conversation with him, one that will take a lot of patience and respect that you might assume neither of you have. But you might surprise yourselves.

A Ritual to Read to Each Other, by William Stafford

If you don’t know the kind of person I am
and I don’t know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dike.

And as elephants parade holding each elephant’s tail,
but if one wanders the circus won’t find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider—
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give — yes or no, or maybe —
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

​For more information about William Stafford, please click here.​ Today’s poem is from his collection The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems, published in 1998 by Graywolf Press. 

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