In Which I Start Out Sour But Get to Good Times at the End

We’ve got some serious healing to do.

I won’t begin this blog with a laundry list of the horrors and challenges and injustices we’ve managed to cram onto our pale blue dot of a home. So. Let’s just do this:

Think of the real-life thing that scares the bejeezus out of you (climate change, dying bees, genocide…dangity-dang there’s some laundry).

If you’re me and you think of this thing, your chest is sure to be cement-block heavy, your throat is sure to be tight, and your mind is most sure to be so, so tired of knowing this known thing. And, if you’re a poet, I think you may have come upon a day wherein you wondered how the heck a poem could possible help this breaking, broken, mud-storm of a place.

I don’t know where you are with that question. I don’t know if you asked it at all. I don’t know if you asked it, then careened right past with fists a-swingin’. I did not.

I had a couple years of some pretty deep sadness that looked (and I’m not proud) mostly like this: drunkenly night swimming in Lake Superior and learning everything there is to know about End Time predictions. This was not cute. This is no way to live.

I surfaced and decided it was best for me and the planet to learn to farm and to stop reading conspiracy theory websites. And then, wonder of wonders, I had a baby.

Friends, here’s where the poetry returns.

Because I’m not a farmer. While I will happily grow a yard full of edibles, and while I’ll happily worship the ground my farmer-friends restore, I’m not a farmer. I suddenly had this son who was a citizen of the world, and I wanted to show him a world worth saving. Which meant I wanted to show him the beauty. Which meant that I needed to see the beauty.

Which meant my run-off-the-grid-with-a-shotgun inclined brain needed to get healed. 

Wendell Berry did that. Goodness, did he heal my mind, that poet who is also a farmer and most certainly a medicine man (there will be much to say about him in the future, on this here blog).

And there was my answer: poetry does have a place in this fight. Poetry turns the fists into palms. Poetry is a battle cry, and poetry is medicine.

So now, when I ask myself what medicine do I have to give? To my son, to the dirt, to society? The answer is never, ever despair. It is never fear (though I still struggle with both).  I want to join the fight with my huge-drum love and my keen-seeing hope. 

Poetry is what gets me there.