Poetry Break
A Favorite Poem, A Memory, A Meeting
Yesterday, as I headed off for a weekly meeting, I folded a poem I had printed several years ago and folded into my little lime green notebook, with the absurd idea I would take it out and read to the group for four or five cranky adults, who had they had their druthers would not be at that morning meeting, feeling powerless and beside the point.
I walked into the already heated air of another aired Arizona summer, noticing the day, the quality of light before the world is entirely laid bare by the sun. I remembered in fourth grade my teacher, Ms. Harris, had us memorize a poem and then show up to another classroom at a random time and interrupt whatever math or other perfunctory learning was taking place to recite a poem. These are the things you can do in school, memorize and recite a poem, and it is considered reasonable, delightful. And so it was that I wore two large posterboards, linked with string across my shoulders, with the words Poetry Break written in fat purple marker, knocked on the door to a classroom down the hall and shouted along with my fellow classmate, “Poetry Break!.”
The poem I had decided to memorize was rather a nonsense poem, something about an elephant and silly words to rhyme. The poem was playful, with made up words, and this is what had attracted me to it. It was not pretentious; it was just for fun. I’m not sure I communicated that well, as I recited the poem as fast as I could so that I could retreat back into myself and not be the person in the room with all eyes on me. If anyone made out any particular line, it was purely by accident, as I spat the words out in double time, like the list of side effects on a pharmaceutical commercial.
This was not a particularly successful moment of my school career. I was aware on some level that my poor delivery undermined what my teacher was hoping to achieve. But that is a question I still have. What was she hoping to achieve? What was the point?
The poem I had folded up on in my notebook was Letting the Emptiness Become My Government by Marcus Jackson. I am not a poetry connoisseur by any stretch, the last time I remember being tasked with analyzing a poem in junior year of college, well over half a lifetime ago. This is not something I typically do or am drawn to, but I happened across that poem in my Facebook feed of all things one morning during the anxious at-home days of the pandemic, amidst the pictures of people’s dog children or actual children or sarcastic memes and outrage at world events we are helpless to stop. I read the poem and it stopped me in my tracks. I recognized the feelings in it, if not the particular circumstances. This is a poem about seeing such painful things and staying quiet, about being afraid to tell them because you might not manage to express the urgency, or maybe more to the point, that people just don’t want to hear it. Perhaps they are already know and there is nothing to be done. And the feeling that I want to tell something, but what is it exactly I want to tell? What does my winding and mostly inconsequential story lead up to? What is the point?
Decades I’ve been pipe-dreaming of finding
a life as concise as a wartime telegram.
Ultimately, I’ve ended up compiling
an archive of miscommunication
and the faded receipts of secondary disgraces.
Even though I don’t know exactly what it means, I am quite sure I have so many faded receipts of secondary disgraces! The next lines are not a faded receipt; they are a wartime telegram, devastating. The speaker has a central if unintentional role in this devastation:
In third grade, a friend’s uncle stole the two dollars
from my pocket as I slept on their couch,
and later he must’ve hurried into the night
toward a flat in the nearby building
where a newly minted narcotic promised
to evict the misgivings from all riled souls.
And then we get to the poem’s title, on being ruled for a long time by silence:
I told no one of the theft, letting the emptiness
become my government, my friend’s
mother counting her food stamps while we walked
the late-morning blocks to a bustling grocery,
within which she eventually smacked
the hopeful face of my friend as he reached
again for too costly a thing.
Can’t you feel the sting of those two last lines, slapping us out of our indifference?
I arrived after a short walk to this meeting and I kept the poem folded in my little notebook, instead scribbling notes about work remaining, work left undone, the work I was being paid to do, as I understood it. My fantasy about reading this poem — well instead I let the emptiness become my government. And let’s be real, they might have tied me up in a straightjacket had I read it. It was an unusual and unsettling impulse.
After the meeting concluded, I spoke for a bit with a woman who also attends these meetings. In fact, of anyone assembled, I would say she feels the burden of those meetings the most. She is a sensitive soul. We stood in the shadows of a building, leaning on a railing, as she unburdened herself of negative emotions accrued as she did her damnedest just to do her job.
A scruffy grey man in wheelchair stopped just short of us. We thought maybe we were in his way so scooted further into the railing. “I have so many memories,” he said. “I helped build that building.” He gestured toward a building across the street. “Well, not that one, a few block down, the grocery store.” We knew the building he meant. His eyes were very blue, made more so by red rim of swollen eyes. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to burden you,” he said and he rolled away.
I looked at my coworker ready to continue our conversation and her eyes were glassy with tears. I knew she was frustrated, I understood the tears. I cry when I am frustrated too. “I’m sorry,” she said, not even bothering to wipe her eyes. “That was just so sad.”
She had meant the man with so many memories and apparently no one but us to hear them. I was amazed that I had closed myself off to feeling anything about him. But I had. And that was devastating.
