Unlearning

We are convinced

that we have nothing

to learn about

grief,

that we’re human

and so we grieve,

that our instincts

will tell us what is an outrage,

what is a tragedy,

what is too much,

what is too far.

We are human

so we must know

innately

what inhumanity is.

I think we’re wrong.

Maybe we start out that way.

I’m not sure.

But we learn somewhere

along the way

which things we

will cry out against

and which things

will merely merit

shaking our heads over,

What a shame.

Did you hear about 

[insert tragedy here]?

We learn these things.

I know

because I’ve

unlearned some of it.

I know because

last night something hit me

in the stomach with the

force of a fall

(like when, as a child,

 I tripped in the front yard

and fell on a brick

and couldn’t breathe,

couldn’t even make a sound,

but when the air rushed back

I cried out instinctively,

wailed out loud

before the pain even

registered in my brain).

Last night I grieved for something
I’d never felt in quite that way before.

Don't get me wrong.

I'm still pretty trite. 

Like when I'm upset 

about the news I'm reading, 

I go on a jog and

write poetry,

because my default reaction

is to wrap myself up in the mantle

of my very enlightened

reactions to the world, 

a sort of self-satisfied melancholy

because at least I have the humanity 

to call these things outrageous. 

I cry a lot these days, and then I have

the audacity to all but congratulate

myself for feeling sad. 

But it isn't all self-centered. 

The point of this poem is that

some of it is real, and I'm trying to

find the pieces of it that I want to keep. 

I was praying. Or reading a prayer,

but for me they are the same thing. 

Someone else's words, but as they emerged

from my lips, as I prayed

for the poor and the persecuted

and the sick, the refugee and the prisoner

and the endangered and the broken,

I wept aloud. 

And I asked God for mercy. 

Not for the broken, because God is

with the broken, God is always with the broken.

But I asked mercy for we who do the breaking. 

And I tried not to feel self-satisfied afterward. 

Not because I'm strong; because it just won't go away

Though I feel

at times

broken or

empty (as though

plundered, as

though

bruising fingers

have rifled

through the leaves

of my mind

and found little

but have torn it and

crushed it anyway,

for fun),

though I feel

at times

like nothing

good escapes the

searing heat

of this world,

though I feel

at times

wounded

and lonely and

bent from what I’m

meant to be,

there is hope.

Do you hear me?

There is hope.

“Sometimes

the bravest thing of all

is to hope.”

 --Brave Saint Saturn

 

I remember my affliction and my wandering, 

the bitterness and the gall.

I well remember them, 

and my soul is downcast within me.

Yet this I call to mind

and therefore I have hope:
Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed,
for his compassions never fail.
They are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness.
--Lamentations 3:21-23

The Contemplativeness of Things

Like laundry, I mean.

It’s been said a lot, that

there’s meaning in small things,

and of course I only

want to say new things

which is at best naïve

and at worst self-important.

But I’ve gotten off track.

Here’s what it feels like:

one moment you’re folding laundry

and it’s part of that endless

list of things to do (they don’t call it

a laundry list for nothing)

and in a split second,

it transmutes—the whole thing, your

hands, your mind, your heart, the

things you’re

touching—

into eternity, or into

meaning, or maybe into happiness

although that’s not quite it.

The point is that there’s a

switch and in an instant making

a pile of shirts

isn’t a task but an act in itself

and you feel that a life is made

of things like this;

but then you rebel because

even saying that sounds lame,

and the feeling itself is

enormous, really.

There’s a peach colored shirt,

loose-fitting and a bit stretched out,

a little pocket on the front left side.

I feel breezy in it, and grown-up

(the oddest thing about that being
that it’s ceased to feel odd).

And in the act of setting it on

four other shirts, I was

transported more solidly into

the current moment than I

ever manage on purpose.

The more I talk around the moment

the further it gets from words.
But it was beautiful.