by François-Xavier Fabre (1800)
Life in America today feels chaotic—unmoored, even. Not long ago, we were enjoying the strongest post-pandemic economy in the world and, for all our flaws, still held a place of trust and respect among nations. Now, it feels as though we’re in retreat from the very values that have defined us for nearly 250 years. Our economy is shaky, our moral compass seems scrambled, and our global standing has taken a nosedive. Former allies are pushed aside, while historic adversaries are reframed as potential friends. How the heck did we get here?
For some time now, I’ve felt we’re living through the final convulsions of an outdated, constricted worldview—a last gasp, if you will. The future, by contrast, looks vibrant in its diversity, and stronger for it. But the old mindset is panicking. It scapegoats the “other” for its own decline, retreats into fear, and recoils from empathy, love, and peace. It would rather enforce authorityrrany—a toxic blend of authoritarianism and tyranny—than allow for genuine autonomy. In clinging to control, it seeks to impose a narrow minority’s will on a richly diverse majority.
Still, the tide is too strong against it. I believe the day will come when we look back on this era and see it clearly for what it was: a necessary darkness before the dawn. As poet Seamus Heaney (1939–2013) wrote, “the longed-for tidal wave of justice” will break, and when it does, it will wash away the debris of this fearful, closed-off way of thinking.
That famous line comes from Heaney’s The Cure at Troy, his poetic reimagining of a play by the ancient Greek dramatist Sophocles. The work wrestles with questions of morality, deceit, political compromise, suffering, and the hope of healing. Heaney’s brilliance lies in how he connects these ancient themes to the struggles of our modern lives. Lately, I’ve been thinking often of the stanza containing that “tidal wave” line—and the even more quoted line about hope and history rhyming. I decided to revisit the full passage, and what I found feels especially fitting in these troubled times:
From The Cure at Troy
Human beings suffer,
They torture one another,
They get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
Can fully right a wrong
Inflicted and endured
…
History says, don’t hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.
So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles
And cures and healing wells.
Call miracle self-healing:
The utter, self-revealing
Double-take of feeling.
If there’s fire on the mountain
Or lightning and storm
And a god speaks from the sky
That means someone is hearing
The outcry and the birth-cry
Of new life at its term.
It means once in a lifetime
That justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme.
—Seamus Heaney
Ground Zero: Trying to Write About 9/11
September 11, 2010
In the wake of tragedy on September 11, 2001 — in the face of it, in some ways — there were reports of poems appearing all over New York. On lampposts, bus stops, phone booths, taped over advertisements; poems to lost loved ones, the missing, the dead, to the world.
Poetry seemed to be a healing force for some, a way of calling out in remembrance for others. Poems then started to appear in print, as poets from Deborah Garrison to Wisława Szymborska tried to come to grips with what had happened that day.
I tried to write a poem to express what I felt about that day. I wasn’t there, I was 100 miles away in Philadelphia, but some people I love were there and their lives were forever changed by the tragedy. All of us were.
I started writing the poem that November and worked on it for a while before giving up. It wasn’t easy to write about. I took it out again six years later and found it wanting. I was reminded of the poem today — nine years after the tragedy — and decided to share it here.
Here is my poem, “Ground Zero”:
Neighbors worked in these buildings;
buildings no longer there, no longer here.
Their emptiness fills the space once occupied.
How tall is emptiness?
How empty is remembrance?
Memory flares, burns out.
Neighbors are strangers become familiars,
and neighborhoods are the places we meet
the stranger’s glance, acknowledge or turn away.
Only now, who can turn away?
Who can pretend innocence?
Decoy repelling and attracting.
The boy in Belfast on his way to school
who runs past the empty spaces
between houses, fearing snipers;
the girl who fears an ill-timed car bomb;
the mother awaiting children from the playground;
the father fearing policeman protecting and serving.
Neighbors may be those we’d least like
to live with, but they make our community.
The empty space left by buildings gone.
Our hearts wanting for lack of something,
connection, community, solace–
Who can fill the space gone empty, gone?
(for Barbara Einzig & Chloe Indigo Hannah Guss)
–Scott Edward Anderson
Merwin Is the Right Choice for U.S. Poet Laureate
July 1, 2010
Some folks will say W. S. Merwin is too old, too establishment, too difficult to be Poet Laureate. They’ll be wrong. Merwin is the right choice at this moment in time.
Not only has he revitalized his own writing at such a late stage — 82 years young — but he continues to inspire younger poets and readers of poetry around the world.
What’s more, in the wake of the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, Merwin brings his considerable appreciation and concern for the planet to the post.
I applaud the choice of W.S. Merwin as the 17th U.S. Poet Laureate.
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Deborah Digges, Struggling Without Light
April 18, 2009
“Once I asked myself, when was I happy?
I was looking at a February sky.
When did the light hold me and I didn’t struggle?”
–Deborah Digges, “Broom”
I guess the light stopped holding her. Deborah Digges died a week ago, an apparent suicide, having fallen from the top of McGuirk Alumni Stadium at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
I’m saddened by the suicide of this remarkable poet. And wondering why so many poets seem to burn so hot they flame out and can’t find their way out.
I was troubled by the suicide of biologist Nicholas Hughes, whose mother took her own life in a famous episode many years ago, earlier this month. And I was troubled by the mass suicide of Indian farmers reported earlier this week.
Clearly Ms. Digges struggled. Failed marriages. The death of her last husband three years after marrying him. Rescuing her son from the brink.
Yet it doesn’t make it any easier, thinking of her standing at the top of that stadium in Amherst, contemplating or not. Did she hesitate, reconsider?
She was, as Tufts English Department Chairman Lee Edelman said, “a poet of breathtaking talent and astonishing verbal dexterity. Her poems join a keen and unsentimental intelligence with a passionate love for the particularities of things in their beauty, their transience, and their complexity.”
I remember when Ms. Digges’ first collection, Vesper Sparrows, came out; it was quite an achievement. Poet Jorie Graham, whose work I greatly admired at the time (1986) wrote in the New York Times Book Review that Ms. Digges poems asked “of nature that it sing along and provide, at every turn, proof of our rightful place among things.”
She wrote from the intersection of humanity and nature, and often explored the interstices between the two. She seemed filled with and fully committed to understanding our relationship with the natural world, but also our destructive tendencies.
Here is Deborah Digges’ poem “Trapeze,” in its entirety. And a link to an audio file to hear her read it:
See how the first dark takes the city in its arms
and carries it into what yesterday we called the future.
O, the dying are such acrobats.
Here you must take a boat from one day to the next,
or clutch the girders of the bridge, hand over hand.
But they are sailing like a pendulum between eternity and evening,
diving, recovering, balancing the air.
Who can tell at this hour seabirds from starlings,
wind from revolving doors or currents off the river.
Some are as children on swings pumping higher and higher.
Don’t call them back, don’t call them in for supper.
See, they leave scuff marks like jet trails on the sky.
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Scott Edward Anderson
Scott Edward Anderson's Poetry Blog 