Sometimes poetry hits the spot. I always have book of poems on hand to poke through. Through grief, pain, joy, or whatever human experience— it’s nice to have poetic companions. A bonus, sometimes they inspire our teaching or become a lesson themselves. Here are a few I’ve turned to during this rocky year:

view with a grain of sand by Wislawa Szymborska
how to carry water by Lucille Clifton
When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through (Anthology of Native Nations Poetry) edited by Joy Harjo

There are so many more but hopefully you find a moment to read a poem, to have your spirit seen or uplifted.

Here’s a Maybe All This and We’re Extremely Fortunate by Wislawa Szymborska for you just in case.

Maybe All This

by Wislawa Szymborska

Maybe all this
is happening in some lab?
Under one lamp by day
and billions by night?

Maybe we're experimental generations?
Poured from one vial to the next,
shaken in test tubes,
not scrutinized by eyes alone,
each of us separately
plucked up by tweezers in the end?

Or maybe it's more like this:
No interference?
The changes occur on their own
according to plan?
The graph's needle slowly etches
its predictable zigzags?

Maybe thus far we aren't of much interest?
The control monitors aren't usually plugged in?
Only for wars, preferably large ones,
for the odd ascent above our clump of Earth,
for major migrations from point A to B?

Maybe just the opposite:
They've got a taste for trivia up there?
Look! on the big screen a little girl
is sewing a button on her sleeve.
The radar shrieks,
the staff comes at a run.
What a darling little being
with its tiny heart beating inside it!
How sweet, its solemn
threading of the needle!
Someone cries enraptured:
Get the Boss,
tell him he's got to see this for himself!

Translated, from the Polish, by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh

—————

We’re extremely fortunate

by Wislawa Szymborska

We’re extremely fortunate
not to know precisely
the kind of world we live in.

One would have
to live a long, long time,
unquestionably longer
than the world itself.

Get to know other worlds,
if only for comparison.

Rise above the flesh,
which only really knows
how to obstruct
and make trouble.

For the sake of research,
the big picture
and definitive conclusions,
one would have to transcend time,
in which everything scurries and whirls.

From that perspective,
one might as well bid farewell
to incidents and details.

The counting of weekdays
would inevitably seem to be
a senseless activity;

dropping letters in the mailbox
a whim of foolish youth;

the sign “No Walking on the Grass”
a symptom of lunacy.

Translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh

(The End and the Beginning, 1993)