It isn’t ever delicate to live.

Dear readers,

I shared this Kay Ryan (1945-) poem in a missive to friends (some of you who are reading this again) earlier this month and wanted to post it here on the last day of 2022. As I wrote in that correspondence, it isn’t ever delicate to live, but it feels especially less-delicate these days, like we keep spinning our intricate webs as forces around us try to pull them down.

For me the only way forward is to think of what helps my inner arachnid build and rebuild, of what keeps the ropes strong, of what posts I can hang onto, of what inspires me to keep spinning the threads despite it all. There is, of course, labor involved, but this is the work that makes the heavy work lighter to bear.

Sharing poems with all of you is definitely one of those buoying, bolstering forces. Thank you for reading what I shared during National Poetry Month this year. I hope the threads of your life are holding up okay, and that in 2023 you find–and create–support and joy in this delicate web we’re all spinning together.

Art by Kristina Closs

Spiderweb 

From other
angles the
fibers look
fragile, but
not from the
spider’s, always
hauling coarse
ropes, hitching
lines to the
best posts
possible. It’s
heavy work
everyplace,
fighting sag,
winching up
give. It
isn’t ever
delicate
to live.

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You must live with great seriousness

Dear readers,

Thank you kindly for joining me on this month’s journey in verse. It’s always a delight to share the words that have moved me over the past year–and to seek out new poets to introduce to you all. I hope you’ve encountered something along the way that resonated with you, and I very much hope you will keep reading poetry throughout the year.

April’s final poem comes from the incredible Nazim Hikmet (1902-1963), who is considered the first modern Turkish poet. As I mentioned in this month’s introductory post, it is through reading poetry that I often rediscover what is worth celebrating and fighting for in this life, even on the darkest days. These stirring words from Hikmet speak not only to what is at stake in each of the poems I posted this month, but to what is at stake in every day of our lives. Here’s to learning to love this world, seriously and deeply and with every fiber of our beings.

“On Living”

I

Living is no laughing matter:
    you must live with great seriousness
        like a squirrel, for example—
  I mean without looking for something beyond and above living,
        I mean living must be your whole occupation.
Living is no laughing matter:
    you must take it seriously,
    so much so and to such a degree
  that, for example, your hands tied behind your back,
                                your back to the wall,
or else in a laboratory
    in your white coat and safety glasses,
    you can die for people—
even for people whose faces you’ve never seen,
even though you know living
    is the most real, the most beautiful thing.
I mean, you must take living so seriously
  that even at seventy, for example, you’ll plant olive trees—
  and not for your children, either,
  but because although you fear death you don’t believe it,
  because living, I mean, weighs heavier.

II

Let’s say we’re seriously ill, need surgery—
which is to say we might not get up
                      from the white table.
Even though it’s impossible not to feel sad
                      about going a little too soon,
we’ll still laugh at the jokes being told,
we’ll look out the window to see if it’s raining,
or still wait anxiously
                      for the latest newscast. . .
Let’s say we’re at the front—
                  for something worth fighting for, say.
There, in the first offensive, on that very day,
                  we might fall on our face, dead.
We’ll know this with a curious anger,
            but we’ll still worry ourselves to death
            about the outcome of the war, which could last years.
Let’s say we’re in prison
and close to fifty,
and we have eighteen more years, say,
                      before the iron doors will open.
We’ll still live with the outside,
with its people and animals, struggle and wind—
                          I mean with the outside beyond the walls.
I mean, however and wherever we are,
            we must live as if we will never die.

III

This earth will grow cold,
a star among stars
              and one of the smallest,
a gilded mote on blue velvet—
              I mean this, our great earth.
This earth will grow cold one day,
not like a block of ice
or a dead cloud even
but like an empty walnut it will roll along
              in pitch-black space . . .
You must grieve for this right now
—you have to feel this sorrow now—
for the world must be loved this much
                              if you’re going to say “I lived”. .

translated by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk

I want a door opening in me that I can enter

In the spirit of celebrating tenderness, here is the last poem from Jason Shinder’s (1955-2008) Stupid Hope, which was assembled and published after he died from leukemia and lymphoma. I loved this raw collection when I first encountered it years ago and am grateful it recently found its way back to my bedside.

“Untitled”

If there is no cure, I still want to correct a few things

and think mostly of people, and have them all alive.
I want a door opening in me that I can enter

and feel the clarity of evening and the stars beginning.

One after another, I want my mistakes returning
and to approach them on a beach like a man

for whom there is no division between one way or another.

My most faithful body, you are not in the best of shape,
far from the glitter of the river in which you once swam.

But I want good tears when I stand on the street

and, from the sky, drifts down the finest mist on my face.
Not everything is given and it should not permit sadness.

Let me
Let me keep on describing things to be sure they happened.