Poetry Will Save Your Life Read online

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  Summer days we spend exploring the circumference of our backyard and our block. We dig for worms and poke ants between the cracks in the driveway with twigs. We play kick-the-can in the street with other neighborhood kids. We draw hopscotch boards on the sidewalk with chalk. We jump rope. One day a truck pulls up the driveway and the driver unloads a red swing set with three swings, a seesaw, and a slide, a gift from another of my mother’s boyfriends, and installs it in our backyard. We compete in swinging contests to see who can soar the highest. We swing until our stomachs are queasy, until the poles anchoring the set are pulled like roots from the earth, and we feel cherry bumps. Gradually one sister abandons her swing and goes inside, then the other trails behind her, and suddenly I am alone. I move myself back as far as I can go with the tips of my toes to the ground and then release my feet and begin to pump. I feel the wind in my hair, the smell of the summer flowers in the breeze. I close my eyes and soar over the roof of my house, so that I can see into the wide girth of our neighborhood. The world outside the small circumference of my home and my family is in sight. Reachable. Maybe one day I will soar beyond my own horizons.

  THE SWING

  Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894)

  How do you like to go up in a swing,

  Up in the air so blue?

  Oh, I do think it the pleasantest thing

  Ever a child can do!

  Up in the air and over the wall,

  Till I can see so wide,

  Rivers and trees and cattle and all

  Over the countryside—

  Till I look down on the garden green,

  Down on the roof so brown—

  Up in the air I go flying again,

  Up in the air and down!

  * * *

  Robert Louis Stevenson was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on November 13, 1850. He came from a family of lighthouse engineers. During his boyhood he was prone to illness and spent many of his childhood winters in bed, entertained by reading Shakespeare and The Arabian Nights. I wonder if the inspiration for “The Swing” began there—Stevenson sick and alone in his bed, feeling his own separateness. The poem’s simple rhyme scheme and singsong cadence, which mimics the act of swinging, is cunningly deceptive. Embodied within the poem is the realization that as high as one soars, one must come down as well. Down to oneself. And looking down is scary. The poet Elizabeth Bishop in her autobiographical story, “The Country Mouse,” writes about the realization of her own separateness on a visit with her aunt to the dentist’s office. She sat outside reading National Geographic. This incident would evolve into her splendid poem “In the Waiting Room.” In her story she writes: “A feeling of absolute and utter desolation came over me. I felt . . . myself. In a few days it would be my seventh birthday. I felt I, I, I, and looked at the three strangers in panic. I was one of them too, inside my scabby body and wheezing lungs.”

  “The Swing” recalls that same frightful realization of one’s own solitary self, sailing over the lip of the horizon “up in the air and down.”

  MEMORY

  I WANDERED LONELY AS A CLOUD

  William Wordsworth

  My son is away at college, my husband is working, and I’m on my own, out for a walk on Gibson beach, in a pensive, solitary mood. It’s December, white clouds billow in the blue sky, it’s fifty degrees, and there is not another person in sight. I walk, stopping to pick up a seashell or a white stone that catches my eye. I turn back toward where I came from and notice the trail of my own footsteps imprinted in the sand. Slowly the brightness of the sun dancing on the water begins to lift me out of my melancholy state. I remember walking this same stretch of beach with my son fifteen years ago when he was a boy of maybe five or six. He held my hips and followed in my footsteps and we chanted, chug-a-chuga chug-a-chuga, choo, choo, forming a mini train in the hot sand. Alone on the beach, I feel the essence of my son in the salty breeze. I remember the way the sun reflected off his shiny blond hair, his fair skin slathered with sunblock, his sunny disposition. The memory lifts my spirits, and when I return home I think about it again, in much the same way William Wordsworth reflected upon his earlier encounter with the daffodils in this lovely poem.

  I WANDERED LONELY AS A CLOUD

  William Wordsworth (1770–1850)

  I wandered lonely as a cloud

  That floats on high o’er vales and hills,

  When all at once I saw a crowd,

  A host, of golden daffodils;

  Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

  Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

  Continuous as the stars that shine

  And twinkle on the milky way,

  They stretched in never-ending line

  Along the margin of a bay:

  Ten thousand saw I at a glance,

  Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

  The waves beside them danced; but they

  Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:

  A poet could not but be gay,

  In such a jocund company:

  I gazed—and gazed—but little thought

  What wealth the show to me had brought:

  For oft, when on my couch I lie

  In vacant or in pensive mood,

  They flash upon that inward eye

  Which is the bliss of solitude;

  And then my heart with pleasure fills,

  And dances with the daffodils.

  * * *

  Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Swing,” published in 1913 in A Child’s Garden of Verse, may have been inspired by this William Wordsworth poem written between 1804–1807. The two poems share a similar cadence and celebrate the surprise of the natural world. The poem was inspired by William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy Wordsworth’s visit to Glencoyne Park on April 15, 1802. Dorothy Wordsworth describes the encounter in her journal:

  When we were in the woods beyond Gowbarrow Park, we saw a few daffodils close to the water side. We fancied that the lake had floated the seed ashore & that the little colony had so sprung up—but as we went along there were more & more & at last under the boughs of the trees, we saw that there was a long belt of them along the shore, about the breadth of a country turnpike road. I never saw daffodils so beautiful they grew among the mossy stones about & about them, some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness & the rest tossed & reeled & danced & seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the lake, they looked so gay ever dancing ever changing.

  “I Wander Lonely as a Cloud” tells a story of the poet, lonesome from a day of solitary work, who wanders into a field beside a lake and is greeted by a “host” of “golden daffodils” dancing in the breeze. There are “ten thousand” of them, tossing “their heads in sprightly dance.” The sight fills him with amusement and pleasure. It remains in his memory. When the poet is pensive and his “inward eye” recalls the daffodils, the memory fills his solitude with pleasure.

  In his Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth famously described the poetic process this way: “I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” Surely “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” reads as an example of that belief. Though the poem opens in a melancholic mood, it is a happy poem, perhaps simply because the sight of daffodils after a long winter is uplifting. It celebrates the comfort of reexperiencing those things that delight or soothe us. Every spring, when daffodils shoot up in the malls on Park Avenue or in Central Park, I think of this poem, an ode to a flower and to memory, and bask in their yellow glow.

  SHAME

  YOU AND YOUR WHOLE RACE and I, TOO

  Langston Hughes

  The yellow school bus picks us up in the driveway of our school, snug in a pristine suburb where houses—each on its own small square of land—are surrounded by freshly manicured lawns and sprawling maple and oak trees. We are on our way to a field trip downtown to see the Termin
al Tower and then to the art museum. Or maybe these were two different field trips, converged and conflated in my mind to mark the moment when the world and its injustices beyond my own small circumference lodged themselves in my psyche.

  As we leave the suburbs, squished side by side in our seats, the bus takes us through the rundown sections of Cleveland known as the ghetto. It’s late October, and from the school bus window, black children dressed in thin, torn coats, with no stockings, are playing on a porch. Why aren’t they in school? A group of men are huddled together on a street corner passing a bottle in a paper bag. The bus drives past homes of pastel colors where the paint is chipped and porches sag to the ground. On some houses, newspaper is taped to the windows to block out the impending cold. Slowly the ghetto recedes, and we move into the industrial section of Cleveland, where smoke from factories leaves a trail of black smog in the sky, and then toward a cluster of tall steel buildings in Public Square. The bus stops and our teacher points out the tallest building in Cleveland, called the Terminal Tower, a name that scares me. Inside is the train terminal, the last stop on the rapid transit, conceived so that passengers from the suburbs would have a swift commute to work downtown. The tower houses hundreds of offices, where predominantly men and their secretaries go to work. I imagine these men and women inside their individual offices conducting business and then, at six o’clock, rushing out in a flood to catch the train. Suddenly, life outside my home and tiny world is illuminated in all its fascination and wonder. After craning our necks to view the tower, we get back on the bus and head to the museum. Soon the bus takes us up a long drive. We unload in single file at the museum entrance, hang our coats in the coatroom, and are given a little fold-up stool to carry with us while the guide escorts us through the rooms of the museum. I’m maybe ten or eleven. I think about the contrast of having traveled from the suburbs, through the city’s ghetto where cars without tires sit on the side of the road, some houses vacant, then downtown where people work, and now to this modern building where we are told valuable artifacts from earlier civilizations are kept. Inside the pristine museum, so quiet you can hear our footsteps in our saddle shoes and loafers slap the marble floor, are valuable paintings, statues, pottery, and antiquities. It is as if each gallery—Asian, Egyptian, Medieval—opens a window into its own particular time and place. My mind is spinning. I can’t seem to take it all in. We walk outside and stand in front of Rodin’s The Thinker, a statue of a man in a thinking pose—his arm resting on his knee, chin cupped in his hand—a statue in honor of contemplation. But I’m still haunted by the image of the children on the stoop of one of the run-down houses, swinging on the porch rails, and wondering how they will survive the brutal winter with newspapers taped over their windows. I think of hundreds of men dressed in business suits carrying their briefcases to work and wonder why the men on the street corners in the ghetto don’t have jobs too. Something isn’t right.

  We view many paintings that day: Fight Between a Tiger and a Buffalo by Henri Rousseau; Salvador Dalí’s eerie and nightmarish The Dream; The Crucifixion of St. Andrew by Caravaggio—just as haunting as the Dalí painting. But it is the images of the ramshackle streets of East Cleveland that stay and haunt me. Back inside the bus, tired from traipsing through the airless, claustrophobic museum, we drive back home. I can’t stop thinking about the ghetto, where smashed beer bottles, crushed soda cans, and fast-food wrappers litter the streets, as the bus leads us into our immaculate suburb. And as I look out the window at the rows of white painted houses with black shutters or brick colonials that line our streets, some with wreaths on the front door, I’m ashamed. Why us and not them? I’m suddenly afraid. My mother complains about all the bills stacking up and she worries about having enough money. I wonder if we’ll end up one day in the ghetto. When I come across the poems by Langston Hughes, I remember my own sense of bewilderment and shame, and worse, my gratitude, for nothing more than the accident of being born into white privilege.

  YOU AND YOUR WHOLE RACE

  Langston Hughes (1902–1967)

  You and your whole race.

  Look down upon the town in which you live

  And be ashamed.

  Look down upon white folks

  And upon yourselves

  And be ashamed

  That such supine poverty exists there,

  That such stupid ignorance breeds children there,

  Behind such humble shelters of despair—

  That you yourselves have not the sense to care

  Nor the manhood to stand up and say

  I dare you to come one step nearer, evil world,

  With your hands of greed seeking to touch my throat, I dare you to come one step nearer me:

  When you can say that

  you will be free!

  I, TOO

  Langston Hughes

  I, too, sing America.

  I am the darker brother.

  They send me to eat in the kitchen

  When company comes,

  But I laugh,

  And eat well,

  And grow strong.

  Tomorrow,

  I’ll be at the table

  When company comes.

  Nobody’ll dare

  Say to me,

  “Eat in the kitchen,”

  Then.

  Besides,

  They’ll see how beautiful I am

  And be ashamed—

  I, too, am America.

  * * *

  Langston Hughes’s poetry is known for its insightful depiction of black life in America. He was born in Joplin, Missouri. His parents divorced when he was five, and he spent most of his childhood in the care of his grandmother in Lawrence, Kansas. After his grandmother’s death in 1915, he returned to live with his mother and her second husband in Lincoln, Illinois, and then in Cleveland, Ohio, where he attended high school. Enduring a childhood of loneliness and dislocation, he retreated into the “wonderful world of books.” He published his first poems and stories in his high school magazine. When he was nineteen he wrote “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” the poem that launched his career after it was published in the Crisis, edited by W. E. B. Du Bois, about his deep heritage as seen through the rivers stemming back to the Euphrates and the Nile, to the “singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went to New Orleans.” Paul Laurence Dunbar, Carl Sandburg, Claude McKay, and Walt Whitman were his poetic influences. In poems about and for African Americans, influenced by jazz and blues, he documented the experiences of urban figures such as elevator operators, cabaret singers, and streetwalkers. His famous poem about America, “I, Too,” with echoes of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” calls for the inclusion of black voices not only in the poetic canon but also in America itself.

  The poem is partially inspired by a trip Hughes took when he secured a job as a mess boy on a freighter bound for Africa. As the boat pulled out to sea he decided to throw all of his books into the ocean. “It was like throwing a million bricks out of my heart for it wasn’t only the books I wanted to throw away, but everything unpleasant and miserable out of my past: the memory of my father, the poverties and uncertainty of my mother’s life, the stupidities of color-prejudice, black in a white world . . . ” The only book he did not throw overboard was Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.

  Along with the poem “I, too,” it is hard to recall Langston Hughes without thinking of his poem “Dreams,” whose lines “Hold fast to dreams / For if dreams die / Life is a broken-winged bird / That cannot fly,” become more potent and necessary if we read them alongside his poems that long for an America where the races live in equality.

  Perhaps what makes these poems visceral is that the figures who reside within them come to life. In “I, Too,” the boy, no doubt the son of a servant or slave, who is asked to retreat to the kitchen when company comes is made human. His pain and declaration of strength are telegraphed to the reader, allowing for an outpouring of our own manifestations of injustice and shame.

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p; ANCESTORS

  PSALM 23: “THE LORD IS MY SHEPHERD”

  Poetry follows me to Hebrew school on Saturday mornings when the rabbi reads from the Song of Solomon and tells elaborate tales from the Bible. We learn the prayers for bread and wine, prayers for particular holidays, prayers to honor the dead. Many of them begin with these Hebrew words: Baruch atah Adonai Eloheinu. Blessed are you, Lord, our God, King of the universe.

  At my grandmother’s graveside on the morning of her funeral, the rabbi asks us to recite in unison the King James Version of Psalm 23, and our collective voices in the gray afternoon form a chorus of grief and mourning. After the prayer, we sprinkle a handful of soil onto her closed coffin. The casting of soil from the ground and the reciting of the psalm are rituals of mourning that allow us to honor the dead and seal the loved one in memory. As I recite the psalm along with the other mourners who have gathered at the gravesite, I think of my father in his dwelling place and his mother, my grandmother, now with him, and that one day I too will be dwelling in the house of the Lord forever. Does it matter whether heaven is a real physical place or a place of spirit? That the psalm may have been written as a myth of consolation? Aren’t these collective hieroglyphs of faith the things that sustain us? Aren’t poems the same as prayers?

  My father’s mother was from Vilna, Poland, a predominantly Jewish city on the border of Poland and Lithuania, before the Nazis invaded and it became a Nazi-run ghetto. She left the old country for America and married my grandfather when she was sixteen. Her sister stayed behind and did not survive the Holocaust. My grandmother’s accent is thick and foreign, and in her strained pronunciations of English are echoes of pain and displacement.