Poem of the Week, by Tom Hennen
After a lifetime of winter (the Adirondack mountains, Vermont, Minnesota) I can do without -40 windchills, insta-frozen nose hairs, ice and the mummification required to step onto the front steps with shovel in hand, but I could never do without the change of seasons. Spring, summer, fall, winter: I don’t know how life is experienced by people who live in places where nothing much changes, weatherwise. I only know what it feels like to wake up and step outside and smell the air and look at the sky and listen to ice melting or birds singing or wind in the leaves, to see that first maple leaf flutter red to the ground in the fall or that first pussy willow budding in the spring, and how it hurts my heart. Not hurts, exactly, but that’s part of it. Stretches my heart. Fills my heart. Reminds me that time is turning, for all of us —In the darkness of the barn their woolly backs were full of light gathered on summer pastures–and how nothing ever really goes away. Every summer is held deep in the heart of every winter.
Sheep in the Winter Night, by Tom Hennen
Inside the barn the sheep were standing, pushed close to one
another. Some were dozing, some had eyes wide open listening
in the dark. Some had no doubt heard of wolves. They looked
weary with all the burdens they had to carry, like being thought
of as stupid and cowardly, disliked by cowboys for the way they
eat grass about an inch into the dirt, the silly look they have
just after shearing, of being one of the symbols of the Christian
religion. In the darkness of the barn their woolly backs were
full of light gathered on summer pastures. Above them their
white breath was suspended, while far off in the pine woods,
night was deep in silence. The owl and rabbit were wondering,
along with the trees, if the air would soon fill with snowflakes,
but the power that moves through the world and makes our
hair stand on end was keeping the answer to itself.
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Young woman across the street, waving and calling to me as I trudge through the snowdrifts on the way home from 
Poetry sites are bookmarked on my computer and the first thing I do when I wake up is go from one to the other, reading poems. Four per morning, sometimes more. I hardly ever read any poems I like. Why do you read poems you don’t like? asks the man who knows me best, watching me sigh and roll my eyes. Because I have to read a ton of poems I don’t like in order to find one I do like, which is the truth. Maybe one out of a hundred poems will seize me. Even so, one out of a hundred poems adds up. They add up and up and up, to a beautiful tumble of beautiful poems I will keep reading forever. You know what else adds up? Cruel statements add up, and vicious diatribes add up, and chants of lock her up add up, and rallies of falsehoods and hatred add up. But good deeds add up too, damn it, and so do people who fill a hollow no one else can fill, as in this beautiful poem below. Hail to the unsung and underpaid caregivers, for they are the ones who mend the wounds, smooth the sheets, clean the vomit of humanity from the streets and from our souls.
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.
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.
