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.