Painfully life-affirming poetry

Poetry can, like a sealed crypt, appear inaccessible, impenetrable, and without reason. However, like any other art form, certain poems can, and will, move certain people. I don’t think there is a such thing as "getting" poetry, but the closest I’ve come to this is through encountering poems that kicked me in the stomach in some way or another. I have selected four poems from the ‘Staying Alive Trilogy’, published by Bloodaxe, which I find almost painful to read… but in the best possible way.

They "distil the human heart as nothing else," as Jane Campion commented on the collection. They draw upon love, mortality, godlessness, and the meaning of life. These poems are heavy but with a light, readable touch.

1. You Don’t Know What Love Is by Kim Addonizio

but you know how to raise it in me like a dead girl winched up from a river. How to wash off the sludge, the stench of our past. How to start clean. This love even sits up and blinks; amazed, she takes a few shaky steps. Any day now she’ll try to eat solid food. She’ll want to get into a fast car, one low to the ground, and drive to some cinderblock shithole in the desert where she can drink and get sick and then dance in nothing but her underwear. You know where she’s headed, you know she’ll wake up with an ache and a terrible thirst. So to hell with your warm hands sliding inside my shirt and your tongue down my throat like an oxygen tube. Cover me in black plastic. Let the mourners through.

2. A Brief for the Defense by Jack Gilbert

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies are not starving someplace, they are starving somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils. But we enjoy our lives because that’s what God wants. Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women at the fountain are laughing together between the suffering they have known and the awfulness in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody in the village is very sick. There is laughter every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta, and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay. If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction, we lessen the importance of their deprivation. We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure, but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world. To make injustice the only measure of our attention is to praise the Devil. If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down, we should give thanks that the end had magnitude. We must admit that there will be music despite everything. We stand at the prow again of a small ship anchored late at night in the tiny port looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning. To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth all the years of sorrow that are to come.

3. Missing God by Dennis O’Driscoll

His Grace is no longer called for before meals: farmed fish multiply without His intercession. Bread production rises through disease-resistant grains devised scientifically to migrate His faults.

Yet, though we rebelled against Him like adolescents, uplifted to see an oppressive father banished – a bearded hermit – to the desert, we confess to missing Him at times.

Miss Him during the civil wedding, when, at the blossomy altar of the registrar’s desk, we wait in vain to be a fed a line containing words like ‘everlasting’ and ‘divine’.

Miss Him when the TV scientist explains the cosmos through equations, leaving our planet to revolve on its axis aimlessly, a wheel skidding in snow.

Miss Him when the radio catches a snatch of plainchant from some echoey priory; when the gospel choir raises is collective voice to ask Shall We Gather at the River? or the forces of the oratorio converge on I Know That My Redeemer Liveth and our contracted hearts lose a beat.

Miss Him when a choked voice at the crematorium recites the poem about fearing no more the heat of the sun.

Miss Him when we stand in judgement on the lank Crucifixion in an art museum, its stripe-like ribs testifying to rank.

Miss Him when the gamma-rays recorded on the satellite graph seem arranged into a celestial scorem the music of the spheres, the Ave Verum Corpus of the observatory lab.

Miss Him when we stumble on the breast lump for the first time and an involuntary prayer escapes our lips; when a shadow crosses our bodies on an x-ray screen; when we receive a transfusion of foaming blood sacrificed anonymously to save life.

Miss Him when we exclaim His name spontaneously in awe or anger as a woman in the birth ward calls to her long-dead mother.

Miss Him when the linen-covered dining-table holds warm bread rolls, shiny glasses of red wine.

Miss Him when a dove swoops from the orange grove in a tourist village just as the monastery bell begins to take its toll.

Miss Him when our journey leads us under the leaves of Gothic tracery, an arch of overlapping branches that meet like the hands in Michelangelo’s Creation.

Miss Him, when, trudging past a church we catch a residual blast of incense, a perfume on par with the fresh-baked loaf which Milosz compared to happiness.

Miss Him when our newly-fitted kitchen comes in Shaker-style and we order a matching set of Mother Ann Lee chairs.

Miss Him when we listen to the prophecy of astronomers that the visible galaxies will recede and the universe expands.

Miss Him when the sunset makes its presence felt in the stained glass window of the fake antique lounge bar.

Miss Him the way an uncoupled glider riding the evening thermals misses its tug.

Miss Him, as the lovers shrugging shoulders outside the cheap hotel ponder what their next move should be.

Even feel nostalgic, odd days, for His Second Coming, like a standing in the brick dome of dovecote after the birds have flown.

4. Late Fragment by Raymond Carver

And did you get what you you wanted from this life, even so? I did. And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on this earth.