When children go hungry and migrants have no refuge, when flooding kills thousands in Libya while smoke from Canadian wildfires makes it hard for people in Florida to breathe, when one friend is diagnosed with Parkinson’s and another with cancer, what entitles me to sit in my garden and write a poem? Why make art of any kind when the world is falling apart?
The refugee crisis and world hunger and climate change sometimes paralyze me. What can one ordinary person do after installing solar panels and donating to the food bank? I bake banana bread, read Keats’ “Ode to Autumn,” and drink coffee with my girlfriends— anything to drown out the creeping dread I’m often not even consciously aware of. It eventually finds me in my dreams though: the bus to nowhere, the oncoming wave the size of a mountain, no place to hide from whatever sinister figure is stalking me that night.
When it’s impossible to forget and hard to hope, what can one ordinary person do?
Be curious.
Pay attention.
Resist numbness.
Writing a poem helps me do all three. Close observation and a spirit of exploration are solar power for art-making, and on the occasions when they float me into the zone where I lose all sense of time and place, when it’s just my pen and notebook and me, I get fired up with the exhilaration of the creative process as well as pride in making something. “Do poems make a difference?” poet Jane Hirshfield was asked after a reading at Bookshop Santa Cruz recently. The woman who wrote a book about how great poems transform the world answered, “Any action is an escape from paralysis.” Like signing a petition or composting my food scraps, writing a poem gives me a sense of agency.
But it’s not just about me. The poet lights a candle in the dark, both illumination and prayer. Whether I am reading a poem or writing one, it reminds me, in a world that wants saving, I am not alone.
The Kingdom of Enough 
As always, lovely.
Thank you, Mary.
💞
Johanna
Johanna Courtleigh, MA, LPC
Licensed Professional Counselor
http://www.jcourtleigh.com
(503) 473-7787
“If you knew how beautiful you are, you would fall at your own feet.”
Byron Katie
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sent from my iPhone . . .
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Thank you, Johanna!
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You’re not alone. I’m right there with you.
Thanks for writing such an eloquent piece
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Thank you to a beloved fellow poet!
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So eloquently and concisely you articulate our collective rumbling anxiety and give us a solution…if just for the moment. “Any action is an escape from paralysis”. Another wise writing from our dear Mary!!
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Thank you, Karen! (And with much gratitude to Jane Hirshfield!)
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Well said! “Listen to yourself and in that quietude you might hear the voice of God.” –Maya Angelou
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Thank you!
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All of us
born with unique medicine…
I am glad you are a poet and continue to add light to the world.
Thank you for seeing how important it is that you keep writing!
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Yes, there are so many ways to add light to the world …
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I love this Mary! Your poetry is definitely a gift to others. For those of us who aren’t poets the line th
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