Poem 66 (Pandemic Day 69)

To Manage

She writes to me--

     I can't sleep because I'm seventeen

Sometimes I lie awake thinking

     I didn't even clean my room yet

And soon I will be twenty-five

        And a failure

And when I am fifty--oh!

I write her back 

     Slowly      slow

Clean one drawer

     Arrange words on a page

let them find one another

        Find you

Trust they might know something

   You aren't living      the whole thing

        At once

That's what a minute     said to an hour

Without me      you are nothing

Naomi Shihab Nye, Voices in the Air: Poems for Listeners, Greenwillow Books, 2018.

Earlier I posted the Desiderata--one line comes back to me after reading this poem about managing our lives when they are unruly and overwhelming; "beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself.  You are a child of the Universe no less than the trees and the stars you have a right to be here."   

I'm going to be gentle with myself here too and share some of Nye's introduction with you that speaks so beautifully about the focus and intent of this book of poetry, that makes it so worthwhile to read. 

"Poet Galway Kinnell said, "To me poetry is someone standing up, so to speak, and saying, with as little concealment as possible, what it is for him or her to be on this earth at this moment."

Someone--Abraham Lincoln?--once remarked that all the voices ever cast out into the air are still floating around out there in the far ethers--somehow, somewhere--and if we only knew how to listen well enough, we could hear them even now.

Voices as guides, lines and stanzas as rooms, sometimes a single word the furniture on which to sit...each day we could open the door, and enter, and be found. These days I wonder--was life always strange--just in different ways?  Does speaking some of the strangeness help us survive it, even if we can't solve or change it?"