Pat Taub
Research findings reveal reading poetry lowers blood pressure, improves brain functioning and enhances well-being, signaling poetry as a valuable resource for managing our turbulent times.
Poetry reminds us that beauty coexists along with the world’s dark forces. Poems offer companionship; when a poem speaks to us, we feel less alone; when confused, a poem offers clarity.
Since April is National Poetry month, it’s a fitting time to consult poetry books that deliver comfort and inspiration.
Poems that have become my personal first aid:
Emily Dickinson’s “Hope is the Thing with Feathers:”
Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul.
And sings the time without the wounds
And never stops-at all
In “Now I Become Myself,” May Sarton cautions me to appreciate aging’s positives rather than bemoaning its physical limitations:
Now I become myself. It’s taken
Time, many years and places;
I have been dissolved and shaken . . .
All fuses now, falls into place
From wish to action, word to silence,
May Sarton in her study
Alice Walker’s, “Calling All Grandmothers,” emboldens me, shaking me out of my complacency:
We have to live
differently
or we
will die
in the same
old ways.
Therefore
I call on all Grand Mothers
everywhere
on the planet
to rise
and take your place
in the leadership
of the world
Alice Walker
Mary Oliver’s Wild Geese,” insists everyone has value:
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
These lines from Oliver’s “Devotions” awaken me:
All summations have a beginning, all effect has a story, all kindness begins with the sown seed.
Thought bud towards radiance. The gospel of light is the crossroads of –indolence, or action.
Be ignited or be gone.
Rumi warns against complacency:
Wear gratitude like a quote and it will feed every corner of your life.
The work of the eyes is done.
Go now and do the heart-work of the images imprisoned within you.
Wendell Berry spins haunting visions for living bravely:
To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.
Wendell Berry at his home in Port Royal Kentucky 2011. He writes in pencil since he doesn’t own a computer.
Auden’s anguished poem, “September 1, 1939,” written on the outbreak of World War II, frames my heartbreak over the devastation in Palestine, Lebanon, Syria and Iran :
Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies.
Yes, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages.
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair
Show an affirming flame.
Auden reading, “September 1, 1939”
“If I Must Die, by the deceased Palestinian poet, Refaat Alaneer, is a wake-up call:
If I must die,
you must live
to tell my story
to sell my things
to buy a piece of cloth
and some strings,
(make it white with a long tail)
so that a child, somewhere in Gaza
while looking heaven in the eye
awaiting his dad who left in a blaze—
and bid no one farewell
not even to his flesh
not even to himself—
sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up
above
and thinks for a moment an angel is there
bringing back love
If I must die
let it bring hope
let it be a tale.
Refaat Alaneer, shortly before he was murdered by Israel on December 7. 2023
