Category: poetry

A few weeks ago, a childhood friend found me on facebook.  We were never that close through school; we didn’t consciously choose to spend time together, but through all our growing up, we were both there.  As I thought about him, I realised that every significant memory I had was of his kindness.  Small unnecessary things that raised him above the crowd.

Kindness is too often thought to be simple.  Too often used to describe actions that offer ease rather than truth.  But there is a pure form that runs deeper.   I’ve been playing with that thought for weeks, and tonight found a poem that points in the same direction, even as it draws on images that are far away.

Kindness

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
Feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
What you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
How desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
you must see how this could be you,
How he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

–Naomi Shihab Nye
Words under the Words

I’m hoping Sister Sarah will offer some tips on the nuances of the language in the previous post. But until then, I offer this as a sort of gloss on the phrase ‘regagné a lui-même’.

maggie and milly and molly and may
went down to the beach (to play one day)

and maggie discovered a shell that sang
so sweetly she couldn’t remember her troubles, and

milly befriended a stranded star
whose rays five languid fingers were;

and molly was chased by a horrible thing
which raced sideways while blowing bubbles; and

may came home with a smooth round stone
as small as a world and as large as alone.

For whatever we lose (like a you or a me)
it’s always ourselves we find in the sea

e. e. cummings
95 Poems

After a funeral visit, I turned to Larkin for Love Songs in Age. It was in the wrong key. So we try this instead:

To write one song, I said,
As sad as the sad wind
That walks around my bed,
Having one simple fall
As a candle-flame swells, and is thinned,
As a curtain stirs by the wall
–For this I must visit the dead.
Headstone and wet cross,
Paths where the mourners tread,
A solitary bird,
These call up the shade of loss,
Shape word to word.

That stones would shine like gold
Above each sodden grave,
This, I had not foretold,
Nor the birds’ clamour, nor
The image morning gave
Of more and ever more,
As some vast seven-piled wave,
Mane-flinging, manifold,
Streams at an endless shore.

Philip Larkin
1943-1944
The North Ship