I started this post a few weeks ago, when the places on my mind were Houston, Florida, North Korea, Mexico City, and Puerta Rico. I wrote, “It’s Monday night and as far as I can tell, the world is a mess.” Now it’s Monday night again, and I’m adding Las Vegas to the list. As I write, CNN is reporting that they’ve recovered forty-two guns from the hotel and the shooter’s home, and they are replaying for at least the thousandth time the sad staccato sounds of the gunshots.
I feel like I should post something, but I can’t write about guns again. Read this old post if you want anger about guns. I posted it after Sandy Hook. Then I posted it after Orlando.
On nights like tonight, when I can’t keep up with the hurricanes and earthquakes, the shootings, the news of human suffering on scales I can’t begin to imagine, I page through the books of poems on my shelves. Usually I find something there that keeps me going; Ruth Stone or Robert Hass comes through with some poem with a long view that helps me look through the immediate suffering and remember beauty.
Tonight I strike out.
I turn to the internet, google “poems about hope.” I pass over the ubiquitous “thing with feathers” and stop at this one, “Try to Praise the Mutilated World,” by a Polish poet, Adam Zagajewski. It’s a beautiful poem, and you should stop now and read it. I’m not going to say anything here that is more poignant or beautiful or helpful than what you will read in that poem.
I know better than to turn on CNN when something bad is happening in the world, the same way I know that I should eat less sugar and make it to the pool more often. But it’s there, and Fred keeps flipping to it when Monday night football goes to a commercial. All evening I hear tiny snippets of sadness, stories of loss or survival.
Fred flips back to the game and I look back at my laptop. I love how the title of the poem draws you in. “Just try,” the poem says. I’m picturing the poet standing in my family room tonight, looking over my shoulder to the tv, reading the skepticism in my eyes. “I know the world is all fucked up,” I imagine him telling me, “but try to love it anyway.”
A little later in the poem, he’s not so gentle. “You must praise the mutilated world,” he argues. He says this after the memories he’s sharing have gotten a little darker, and it’s like one of those moments when you’re at your worst in the classroom and you’re trying to dodge a question before a student even asks it. There’s a “because I said so” quality to the line that I find poignant. The imaginary Adam Zagajewski in my family room sees the images on my tv, looks at the shooter’s sight line from the thirty-second floor. He knows I’m not buying it.
He backs off. “You should praise the mutilated world,” he tries. I can’t tell if he’s losing confidence or just trying to read me, trying every construction he can to win this argument.
I remember years ago I had a statistics teacher I loved (pause here for a moment–that may be the first time anyone has ever put those words together in a sentence). Whenever he introduced a new concept, he’d give a long, convoluted explanation of how we could tackle the problem. Then he’d say, “But that would be…too hard!” Over the semester, we learned to shout “too hard” whenever he began the sentence. Then, he’d show us what we needed to learn, and it would seem easy.
I want to yell, “too hard,” at Adam Zagajewski, but honestly, my heart’s not in it. I’m remembering how the hawks came back to their nest at the end of my street last summer. I’m thinking about how the adults guarded the fledglings, carried lizards to them, soared overhead in watchful joy. I’m thinking about how the moonlight iced the branches of the sycamore across the street tonight when I walked Rusty, about the urgent rustling we heard above us in the leaves.
It’s been a long day. It’s getting late, and the game just ended. The poem is coming to a quiet end, too, and I’m thinking I should head up to bed. It occurs to me, as the line changes one more time, that maybe Adam Zagajewski isn’t trying to tell me anything at all.
He’s turned his back to me now; he’s headed out the door. “Praise the mutilated world,” he says one last time, glancing over his shoulder, putting on his coat. It’s loud enough to drown out the staccato sound of the shots coming again from the tv. I repeat it to myself after he closes the door.
It’s as simple as a breath, I think, as urgent as a prayer.