© Ellis Rosen

Dear Poets, 

I feel overwhelmed by the ambient anxiety in the air right now. My hands are raw from washing, and I can’t stop refreshing the news. How do we continue to move through our lives when a virus is spreading, events keep getting canceled, and the only way to greet our loved ones is with an elbow bump? Are these the end-times we keep bracing for? I wonder if you might have a poem that reminds us how to stay close to one another while we’re all “practicing social distancing.” Or a poem that will be nice to read when we’re all quarantined? 

Thanks,

Lonely COVID

Dear Lonely,

These days feel like … a lot. For you, a poem, that refuses the overwhelmingness of enormity, calling us back to the possibility of our life-size actions, June Jordan’s “On a New Year’s Eve”:

Infinity doesn’t interest me
… and let the powerful lock up the canyon/mountain
peaks the
hidden river s…

let the world blot
obliterate remove so-
called
magnificence

Lonely, I think so many of us would answer to your name these days. The prospect of being shut up in our own discrete spaces, the events planned to bring us together canceled one after another—it does feel lonely-making, doesn’t it? But here’s the thing: in many ways, the virus does not promote social distance so much as it exposes the distances that already characterize our societies. People who continue to go to work while sick are evidence of the lack of paid sick leave. People not seeking medical care when they’re ill are a direct result of our lack of universal health care in the U.S. Conferences frantically seeking options for remote participation reveal how too many of us have ignored the calls for more accessible options that people with disabilities have been making for years. Jordan writes:

it is this time
that matters

it is this history
I care about

the one we make together
awkward
inconsistent

Every avoidable harm is also an instruction for how we might better care for one another. Social distancing is isolating, yes; it is also an act of connection. It is a commitment to our communal well-being, to diminishing both the harm your body may experience and the harm it may cause. How else can we care for one another? Text your friends to check in on them. Pressure your elected officials to make hand sanitizer and medical care available to people who are incarcerated or living in shelters or otherwise vulnerable. If you’re able, donate to your local food pantry to ensure that students usually dependent on food in schools have enough to eat if their schools close. Building a world that cares for all of us is an act against loneliness, and when the virus subsides—as it eventually will—let’s continue to build that world. We’ve needed it all along.

—CS

 *

Dear Poets,

I graduated college seven months ago and every day I feel like I’m sinking deeper into nothingness. I haven’t been able to get a job in my chosen field—journalism—and almost all my friends have moved away from my city. I’m working a barista job that I love but it doesn’t feel like a future. My father urges me to follow my passion, but I look inside myself to find it and come up empty. I avoid returning the messages of loved ones and mentors because I’m so ashamed of what I am—I can’t let them see. I don’t try meeting new people—how? I try to write for myself but everything I write is such dreck that it makes me ashamed that that’s all I can create. Is there a poem for this emptiness and shame that feels so singular and so isolating?

Yours,
Nobody

Dear Nobody,

Who are you? Joan Didion says that she loves being small and a woman because people underestimate her, and consequently she finds herself in all kinds of spaces where she wouldn’t be allowed if they knew what she was capable of. That is to say: I don’t think Nobody is the worst person to be, so long as you focus not on how others perceive you but on the wideness of possibility that comes with not knowing exactly who you are. I want to offer you a poem for reconnection with yourself, Kabir’s “Untitled [I talk to my inner lover],” translated by Robert Bly:

          I talk to my inner lover, and I say, why such rush?
We sense that there is some sort of spirit that loves birds and animals and the ants—

perhaps the same one who gave a radiance to you in your mother’s womb.
Is it logical that you would be walking around entirely orphaned now?

When I was little, I wrote fan letters to a constellation of people held together only by the random gravity of my love: Michael Jordan, the Queen of England, my great aunt, Yo-Yo Ma. I recently wrote a fan letter to a poet I adore, and it was a beautiful reconnection with that child-part of myself who loves without any self-consciousness, who writes only to testify to what I love, who puts something in the world without expecting a response. In the matrix of measurements that adulthood can feel like, it can be rare to take direction from your interior compass.

Now you are tangled up in others, and have forgotten what you once knew,
and that’s why everything you do has some weird failure in it.

You may not have your dream career—and believe me, I feel your frustration there—but career aspirations are just one form your questions take in the world. Don’t deny yourself what you have. Let yourself love the job you love without holding it up to a future where it falls short. Face the people you love thinking not of how your face looks to them but of how beautiful their faces look to you. Allow yourself the freedom of not-knowing for a while. Move toward what you love without judgemnt. Follow your curiosity. You’ll make your path by walking it.

—CS

*

Dear Poetry Rx,

When I was a child, blissful as could be in the ocean, my parents would stand on the shore frantically waving their hands, urging me to come in closer.  Any time they looked away for a moment, I stole another length of sea and happily drifted a bit farther out. Now, at thirty-two years old, I have found myself moving back into my mother’s home, of all places, for a myriad of reasons (health issues, career change, finances, et cetera). While I am grateful for her welcoming me back, it is hard to not feel like I have failed in my quest for independence, adventure, and distance. I need a poem to remind me that the girl who had no fear of sharks or riptides still lives inside me. That as stuck as I may feel, the ocean and all the faraway land masses still call to me, just as loudly as they ever did. That even if there is no shoreline in sight on the other side of the water, one most certainly awaits. That above all else I still have my feet. 

Sincerely,
Sneaky Swimmer

Dear Sneaky Swimmer,

When I read your beautiful letter, I thought immediately of Adélia Prado’s “Lesson,” translated by Ellen Doré Watson, whose blissful opening scene reminded me of yours:

It was a shadowy yard, walled high with stones.
The trees held early apples, dark
wine-colored skin, the perfected flavor of things
ripe before their time.
Clay jugs sat alongside the wall
I ate apples and sipped the purest water

The lines I love most:

Then my father appeared and tweaked my nose,
and he wasn’t sick and hadn’t died either;
that’s why he was laughing, blood
stirring in his face again,
he was hunting for ways to spend this happiness

These lines teach me something about what poetry can do—hold what will be against what has been so that the past is made present again, this time shimmering with the veneer of loss. And in gathering the past and the present, the lesson promised in the title emerges:

I always dream something’s taking shape,
nothing is ever dead.
What seems to have died fertilizes.
What seems motionless waits.

The girl who stole another length of sea isn’t gone; she’s becoming. What sent you home is the same current that you rode out into the ocean, all those years ago: you’ve always known exactly where you needed to be. You are still swimming. The tide came in. It will go back out, and you’ll drift far from shore once again.

—CS

Want more? Read earlier installments of Poetry Rx. Need your own poem? Write to us!

Claire Schwartz is the author of bound (Button Poetry, 2018). Her poetry has appeared in Apogee, Bennington Review, The Massachusetts Review, and Prairie Schooner, and her essays, reviews, and interviews have appeared in The Iowa Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere.

Dear Poets,

My romantic life has been a series of almosts. Something always intervenes—poor timing, too many miles, someone else—to prevent the early intimacy from flowering into something more. I am deeply thankful for each and every one, but I’m so tired of almost. How do I stay patient as I wait for a love that finally, forcefully blooms? 

Sincerely,
The Not-Quite-Ex

Dear Not-Quite-Ex,

I want to share a poem by Kathryn Starbuck called “Trout,” which is very short. It goes: 

I do my best
to keep pointlessness
at bay. But here,
wet above my
knees, I let it fly.
Here, hot and cold,
fingers thick with
thinking, I try to
tie the fly and look
for the net, loosening
the philosophical
knot of why I came
here today, not yet
knowing whether
I’ll free or fry
the rainbows
and browns once
they’re mine.

I know about the disappointment of almosts. But I love the way this poem reminds us that we can’t possibly know what will feel right until it arrives. Maybe the next almost will become a definitely. Maybe it will become a definitely not. The best you can do is continue the good and difficult work of patience and trust. Have patience in the process of meeting all the rainbows and browns that are on their way, and trust in yourself that when the right one finally arrives, you will know what to do. 

—S

*

Dear Poets,

A few months ago, I was a student in a writing workshop with a well-known poet. I’m a little embarrassed about how much of an effect he had on me. I’m way too old for a schoolgirl crush (although, considering how my grandma acted around her boyfriend when she was in her late eighties, maybe not) and this cuts deeper than a crush. When the class began, I was folded in on myself and atrophied. This beautiful man shattered my sense of self. I’m so grateful—that opening needed to happen in order for me to keep growing as a writer and a person. But I’m lonely, and it’s painful to consider who I could become if I had someone like him in my life. He’s not available, and years ago I promised myself that I wouldn’t invest any more time and emotion in men with whom I can’t build a life. I was able to keep that promise, until he smiled. Can you send me a poem that will give me hope that I’ll meet another man as kind and generous as him? A poem that will help me take what was good and life-changing away from this experience? A poem that won’t make me feel childish for feeling what I feel for a man I don’t really know, but understand, respect, and (dare I say) love deeply anyway?

Thanks,
Shattered, but Trying to Be Hopeful

Dear SbTtBH,

This was a very vulnerable letter to send, and I appreciate you sharing with us. I want to send you a poem by Denise Duhamel called “Sex with a Famous Poet,” which begins,

I had sex with a famous poet last night
and when I rolled over and found myself beside him I shuddered
because I was married to someone else,
because I wasn’t supposed to have been drinking,
because I was in fancy hotel room
I didn’t recognize. I would have told you
right off this was a dream, but recently
a friend told me, write about a dream,
lose a reader and I didn’t want to lose you
right away. I wanted you to hear
that I didn’t even like the poet in the dream, that he has
four kids, the youngest one my age, and I find him
rather unattractive, that I only met him once,
that is, in real life, and that was in a large group
in which I barely spoke up. 

I know you asked for a poem that will give you hope for meeting another man, but I wanted to share this poem with you first, so that you know that you are not alone in harboring a fantasy about a famous poet. It’s not something to be embarrassed about. I have recommended a poem about separating the fantasy of a person from the reality of a person before, but I want to talk to you about the fantasy of poets specifically. As an art form, poetry is often deeply personal and carefully crafted, which means it can also be deceptive. It is easy to love a poem, and to feel so understood by it that it convinces you that you understand and know the poet intimately. Sometimes I am thrown off when I meet a stranger for the first time and they speak to me like they already know me well. My poetry is often deeply personal, and I think they must feel like they have had many windows into who I am. It’s flattering, and in many respects I consider their attention a gift. But the truth is that poems are very small windows, and they’re windows that we poets get to curate! I do not say this to imply that you did not have a meaningful connection with the poet you met in workshop, or to suggest that you are naive in feeling as strongly as you do. I just think it is important to remember that the window you had into this person is limited. He is an entire person outside of that workshop, who, for the most part, you don’t know! He is a human who may be kind and generous as you noted, but is probably also complex. At the moment, he appears as a symbol of what you feel you are missing, but he is not a symbol. He is a whole person with a detailed history, who has already made choices that have made him unavailable to you. That is also who he is. You wrote, “It’s painful to consider who I could be with someone like him in my life.” The good news is that you can be that person, even without him in your life. It is as though you invited him into your living room and he immediately moved some furniture around and said, Hey, did you know there’s a secret room behind the bookshelf? Inside that new secret room, you felt super-charged and excited to connect with someone. It is a room you maybe haven’t visited in a while. But even though he has left the premises, that room is still there. It is up to you to decide to spend time in there again, and who with. Hopefully you will choose someone whom you have a chance to meet on equal footing, whom you can find many windows into, who is available to you. 

—S

*

Dear Poets,

If you viewed my browser history right now you’d find an image search of Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez with his two-year-old daughter, Valeria, who died crossing a river to seek asylum in the United States. You’d find that image on repeat. You’d also find a search for “toddler beds with storage” for my own two-year-old and, I’m sure, an endless collection of mundane, work-related queries. 

It is surreal to me how ordinary things can exist on the same plane, occupying the same space and time, as the horrific. I know realistically that time doesn’t stop, that this is how it’s always been, but I can’t help but feel guilty, bewildered, numbed, askew by how life goes on in its quotidian ways even in such broken times. Perhaps there’s a poem out there that gets at this. I am at a loss. And I am so sorry.

Nightmares and Day Jobs

Dear Nightmares and Day Jobs,

You are experiencing a whiplash that occurs from vacillating so quickly between heartbreak, rage, despair, and mundanity. I think many people feel this dissonance in their lives, and feel hopeless to hold it all at once. I want to recommend a poem by Linh Dinh called “Eating Fried Chicken”:

I hate to admit this, brother, but there are times
When I’m eating fried chicken
When I think about nothing else but eating fried chicken,
When I utterly forget about my family, honor and country,
The various blood debts you owe me,
My past humiliations and my future crimes—
Everything, in short, but the crispy skin on my fried chicken.

But I’m not altogether evil, there are also times
When I will refuse to lick or swallow anything
That’s not generally available to mankind.

(Which is, when you think about it, absolutely nothing at all.)

And no doubt that’s why apples can cause riots,
And meat brings humiliation,
And each gasp of air
Will fill one’s lungs with gun powder and smoke.

Linh Dinh’s poem reflects on the experience of being temporarily distracted from the horrific by the mundane. The poem is not comforting, but I hope it is at least a small reassurance to know that others feel the same whiplash you describe. In terms of what to do about it, I have only an offering of what has helped me. Lin-Manuel Miranda is a longtime role model of mine, and of the many well-known words he has penned, the words of his I return to most often are these: “You cannot let all the world’s tragedies into your heart … But the ones you do let in should count. Let them manifest action.” I think about this every time I start to feel overwhelmed by tragedy. Sometimes your brain cannot hold all of it at once. Sometimes you need to find a toddler bed with storage, or to eat fried chicken, or to search for work queries, or to read a poem. But other times, when a specific tragedy or injustice like the one you describe sits especially heavy in your heart, it is an opportunity to manifest action. Not just an opportunity, but an imperative. Consider donating to Fuerza del Valle, which supports unprotected workers, fights wage theft, and builds a movement for workers’ rights in the borderlands and beyond; or La Union del Pueblo Entero, a community union that supports and organizes members of low-income communities in the Rio Grande Valley. If donating money is not possible, consider donating your time. Do what you have to do. And then do what you can. 

—S

Our poets, brilliant though they may be, would like to remind you that they are only poets. If you or someone you love requires professional help, please consider the resources listed here. 

Want more? Read earlier installments of Poetry Rx. Need your own poem? Write to us!

Sarah Kay is a poet and educator from New York City. She is the codirector and founder of Project VOICE and the author of four books of poetry: B, No Matter the Wreckage, The Type, and All Our Wild Wonder.

© Ellis Rosen

Dear Poets,

I am at a point in my life where I have very little structure, where every day is full of small decisions and every move feels like a long shot. I am in the process of beating an addiction (I hope), but this means that I am fully sober, grounded, and often a very raw kind of awake for every long minute of the day, however brilliant, brutal, or just plain boring it is. Do you have a poem that could quiet my mind or offer me clarity?

Thanks,

Actively Awake

Dear AA,

I remember so clearly the early days of sobriety. I’d stare at my watch willing the time to pass faster, only to see, like in those old high school movies, the second hand seemingly move backward. When your whole life is predicated on feeding your addiction, and then you remove that addiction entirely, you’re suddenly faced with a lot of life. A lot of hours, minutes, seconds. It’s one of the reasons I got so into poetry; it was literally just a place to put myself. I could read a book of poems and not worry about what to do with my body or my mind for an hour, two hours. I could write a poem and somehow make four or six or eight hours just fly by.

For you, I prescribe one of my very favorite poems, Jean Valentine’s “I Came to You.”

I came to you
Lord, because of
the fucking reticence
of this world
no, not the world, not reticence

It’s a bizarre poem, one with very few words (and most of those words are repeated). Its first sentence is a sentence I have repeated to myself like a protection spell throughout my years of sobriety: “I came to you / Lord, because of / the fucking reticence / of this world.”

I’m just as confused as anyone as to what I mean when I say words like “Lord,” and I have even less of an idea of what Jean Valentine means, but my sense is that here, it means something like “that which is bigger than my own ego,” possibly even something like “surrender.” I came to surrender because of the fucking reticence of the world. That makes sense to me. If the whole world loved what I loved (in my case, alcohol and various choice narcotics) as much as I did, there’d be no need for surrender. My behavior would be totally understood by all. But the world’s reticence, its “fucking reticence” brought me to my knees.

But then Jean goes into hyperdrive—“no, not the world, not reticence, oh.” And that “oh”! The volumes I could write around that “oh”! I feel in those two letters the futility of language, the frustration of trying to meaningfully convey any real experience of suffering or grace with these sounds, these barbaric black letters on a page. And then she ends the poem with the only thing she seems to know for certain, the only thing that is absolutely within her purview to state without qualification: “We were sad on the ground.”

—KA

*

Dear Poets,

I’ve recently endured a crisis of faith that resulted in my leaving the only spiritual home and community I’ve ever known. I feel small and lost, yet strangely alive. Even brave? Still, my entire worldview has shattered, and I am in a disorienting free fall. I’m hoping you can help me create a soft place to land with poetry about change.

—Falling, yet Free

Dear Falling,

I love the way your letter frames the leaving as an opportunity for bravery, for creation and change. For you, I prescribe another favorite, Ben Purkert’s “Natural Intelligence.” It begins:

The plural of anything is bound to be sharper:
countless birds spelling V above my head.
Where they land, a field must slightly compress,
hardening under their cool weight.

There’s so much to love in this poem, but I especially love the way it is attentive to change and stasis: the weight of a flock of birds causes a field to “slightly compress,” but the birds themselves remain what they are, something people call a kind of “intelligence.” You say your “entire worldview has shattered,” but you are also feeling “strangely alive.” What flux! Having left your spiritual community you are no longer among as you had been, and that can be painful. But remember, Purkert teaches us that “the plural of anything is bound to be sharper.” What luck, then—you’re looking for “a soft place to land,” and your sharpness has worn away as you’ve moved into aloneness. You’ve already become your own soft place.

—KA

*

Dear Poets,

My girlfriend is about to enter her final year of medical school before she enters the wonderful but terrifying world of the National Health Service. She is utterly brilliant and caring to her core, but I can tell she’s scared. She’s going to be faced with some desperately sad situations (along with some triumphant and remarkable ones) and I think she’s wondering whether she has the strength to handle it and also is petrified of the mistakes she’ll make. Please can you help me to reassure and comfort her?

Yours,
Wanting to Soothe

Dear WtS,

For a long time I thought I was going to be a medical doctor. I was moving through the motions, trying to be a good Iranian boy, taking all the biology classes and doing hard science extracurriculars, imagining myself going to medical school at Johns Hopkins and then working at the Mayo Clinic. My parents were thrilled. Then, I discovered poetry and everything went to hell. To this day, my parents joke (at least I think they’re joking) that they should have taken me out of school the day my English teacher first sent me home with a stack of poetry books.

This to say, I have such profound respect to your girlfriend for doing an incredibly difficult, thankless thing, and for being willing to carry the burden of doing that incredibly difficult thankless thing for, presumably, her whole life. Your desire to support and celebrate her through this makes me love you both, and reading your letter I immediately thought of this poem by Rafael Campo.

what I would like to offer them is this,

not reassurance that their lungs sound fine,

or that the mole they’ve noticed change is not

a melanoma, but instead of fear

transfigured by some doctorly advice

I’d like to give them my astonishment

at sudden rainfall like the whole world weeping,

and how ridiculously gently it

slicked down my hair

Campo is a practicing physician himself—which, sidebar, is totally nuts. I have thrown my entire life into learning how to write poems and still feel like an apprentice. Imagine being able to write as well as Campo and also be a whole entire medical doctor as a career. The mind boggles.

Anyway, your letter made me think of Campo’s poem because it sounds to me like your girlfriend isn’t so much concerned about remembering the right “doctorly advice,” but instead about managing the inevitable losses and griefs inherent to her profession. Her heightened sensitivity to the humanity of her role is an essential calibration, one that I expect will make her uniquely capable of doling out what the doctor in the poem hopes to give. Astonishment, yes. And that most elusive thing to find in a doctor’s office: comfort.

—KA

Want more? Read earlier installments of Poetry Rx. Need a poem? Write to us! In the next installment, Sarah Kay will be answering questions. 

Our poets, brilliant though they may be, would like to remind you that they are only poets. If you or someone you love requires professional help, please consider the resources listed here. 

Kaveh Akbar’s poems have appeared recently in The New Yorker, Poetry, the New York Times, the Nation, and elsewhere. His first book is Calling a Wolf a Wolf. Born in Tehran, Iran, he teaches at Purdue University and in the low-residency M.F.A. programs at Randolph College and Warren Wilson College.

Dear Poets,  

I lost my father suddenly on New Year’s Day. I have lived without him for over a year and a half now, and while I’ve found that my heart is more resilient than I imagined, I’ve started to fear the passing of time. The first of every new month feels like it’s stabbing me with the reminder that time will not slow down. I’m scared for this year to end, because right now I can still claim his death is recent, and it scares me that one day it will be in the distant past. I’m scared that I’ll start forgetting pieces of him, or that I’ll stop thinking about him as much, which would feel like letting him die again. I’m wondering if you can give me a poem about how to accept the passing of time and stop seeing it as the enemy.

Sincerely,
A Fearful Daughter

Dear Fearful Daughter,

I’m so sorry for your loss. For you, Lisel Mueller’s “Missing the Dead”:

I go home and put on a record:
Charlie Parker Live at the Blue Note.
Each time I play it, months or years apart,
the music emerges more luminous;
I never listened so well before.
I wish my parents had been musicians
and left me themselves transformed into sound,
or that I could believe in the stars
as the radiant bodies of the dead.

In mourning her parents, the speaker laments the fact that no clear record of their lives endures. Where can she look to find them now? But the secret of this poem is that the poem’s first half—ostensibly all about the speaker—is not about the speaker at all. In wishing for a form left behind by her parents, the speaker turns toward the world: “I have never listened so well.” In not having anywhere in particular to seek them, she seeks them everywhere.

“I miss you more than I remember you,” the protagonist in Ocean Vuong’s novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous says of his friend who died. In that gap between missing and remembering is a record of living with someone who has gone. Missing is a kind of desire, and desire is a kind of collaboration. It’s not that you’ll start forgetting pieces of your father, so much that remembering will look less like retracing the past and more like re-membering—piecing the past together differently in service of your present and your future. As time passes and the details of your father’s life recede, give yourself space to grieve those transitions; then point to the fullness of your life as proof that he endures.

—CS

 * 

Dear Poets, 

I am on the brink of my college graduation, and I keep thinking about my old best friend. We began our friendship in sixth grade and were close throughout high school and the first year of college. We were both out of place in the suburb where we grew up, and we brought each other great joy. After the first semester of our sophomore year, she basically sent me a break-up text. It hurt, though I understood that our paths were diverging. I’m upset we cannot celebrate this upcoming milestone together, and I’m upset that that the version of her I’ve seen on social media is a person so alien and unknown to me. I was wondering if you have a poem for the loss of a close friendship, or for the magic that is young female friendship, even if the relationship cannot last. Or, if there is a poem that expresses hope for such beautiful closeness, albeit maybe with less intensity, in our adult friendships as we age. Thank you. 

Sincerely,
Old Friend

Dear Old Friend,

I responded to a similar note here. I prescribed Langston Hughes’s poem that describes the heartbreak of losing a friend with the kind of reverberating clarity that perfectly holds the wound and, in the shape of that understanding, offers some salve. I love, though, that you’ve asked not only for a poem that deals with the pain, but one that celebrates friendship. I wanted to give you Angel Nafis’s “Omen to Get Your Ass Up,” which captures that life-affirming feeling of being truly seen: “I am saved for a moment / the suspended heaven of being recognized.” Or that ever-exuberant ode: Frank O’Hara’s “Having a Coke with You,” which reminds me how simply being with a friend can induce a wonder that requires the whole world to describe it. The poem I most want to offer you, though, is Aracelis Girmay’s “Moon for Aisha,” which Girmay wrote for her friend, the poet Kamilah Aisha Moon. The poem opens:

Dear Aisha,
I mean to be writing you
a birthday letter, though it’s not
September, the winter already
nearing, the bareness
of trees, their weightlessness,
their gestures—
grace or grief. The windows
of buildings all shining early, lit with light
& I am only ten & riding
all of my horses home,
still sisterless, wanting sisters.

You do not know me yet.
In fact, we are years away
from that life.

It’s not, on the occasion of writing, Aisha’s birthday. And yet, this letter, celebrating Aisha’s being, takes in the whole year and the whole of the women’s lives. Which is to say: Aisha opens a world of possibility—a portal into their wide-flung lives and deep histories and buoyant desires. This is an adult friendship enriched by all that came before they met. As the poem continues, the speaker imagines Aisha before she knew her:

& then, you, all nearly grown,
all long-legged laughter,
already knowing all the songs
& all the dances,
not my friend, yet,
but, somehow—Out There.

Friendship, like other forms of relation, is neither fixed nor linear. For the friends you’ve lost, there are also the not-yets who, someday, will be calling your name—your losses, your dreams—with their whole lives. The next great friendship that will hold you is out there, and, this time, when you meet that person, you will bring more of yourself along.

—CS

*

Dear Poets,

 Two years ago, I was overcome with the irresistible need to write a certain novel. This book would not leave me until I wrote it, and I labored over it for months. Before this, I had a “good job” and decent career ahead of me, and I had always been frightened of giving into my literary urges. But the novel is a fabulist retelling of my father’s death, and I could not walk away from it. 

I wrote this novel, and it is now in the hands of editors, and will come into the world someday soon. My pain is as follows: my boyfriend and my mother, those who love me most, have not read my book. I have begged both of them, and they have promised me—sometimes my hope gets rekindled because they will read a page or two, and then abandon it for months. I am destroyed that those who urged me to chase my dreams now cannot be bothered to witness them. I want more than anything to share this enormous part of my heart with them. If my beloved asked me to read their work, I cannot imagine not rising to the occasion. Furthermore, both of them are readers in the genre that I’ve written. 

Do you have a poem for me that can ease the loneliness of being a writer? Of creating a world that those you love will not step into? I am so scared that my irritation and lonesomeness will turn into wicked resentment, and that it will eat both my art and my relationships alive if untended, but I cannot beg them yet again to read my book. 

Thank you,
Bereft Bibliophile 

Dear Bereft Bibliophile,

First of all, congratulations on completing your novel. That’s a gorgeous accomplishment! I’m sorry that your boyfriend and your mother have caused you pain by not reading it. The poem I want to offer you exists in a world different from the one you’ve described. I want to share it with you because I return to it often when I think about the complex ecosystem of love and writing. Monica Sok’s “ABC for Refugees” opens with a father teaching his child how to read:

Cherub-bee-dee how does a man
who doesn’t read English well know that cherub-bee-dum
those aren’t really words-bee-dee.
But birds.

…

Cherub-bee-dee, cherub-bee-dum, like how my father says
Fine then! Leave! My mother shouts, Stupid! Dumb! 

The mother is frustrated, but the expression of her frustration—“Dumb!” echoes the space of reading that the father creates: “cherub-bee-dum.” There is kinship there, a convergence even in opposition. The father, “who doesn’t read English well,” opens a world for the child and sets her on a path of flight:

Birds? What are birds?
Thanks to my father, reading with me, I have more feathers.

With what she now knows, the child then calls back to her mother:

Mother, mother. Repeat after me.
Cherub-bee-dee, cherub-bee-dum!
We read together before bedtime.

I don’t know why your mother and your boyfriend haven’t read your book, but I wonder whether you might—alongside that question—turn to another question: in what other ways have your mother and boyfriend made your writing possible? To prepare someone to move into a place where you can no longer accompany them is a great act of love. Your loves helped you to build the life that you needed in order to make that novel’s world, even if they won’t visit; in turn, your writing, I hope, transforms you so that you can love better.

I do think there is some loneliness inherent in being a writer. Creating—putting into the world that which did not before exist—means, for a little while at least, that you are dwelling alone. There is also deep comfort in being a writer because you will find readers, people who, for now, are still strangers to you but who, I have no doubt, will find something they need in your words. They will meet you there. To be a writer is to believe that you don’t yet know all of your kin. It is an act of faith that you might find them. Your family, in loving you, has made your making possible, and there will be more, new family waiting for you on the other side. 

—CS

Want more? Read earlier installments of Poetry Rx. Need your own poem? Write to us!

Claire Schwartz is the author of bound (Button Poetry, 2018). Her poetry has appeared in Apogee, Bennington Review, The Massachusetts Review, and Prairie Schooner, and her essays, reviews, and interviews have appeared in The Iowa Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere.

© Ellis Rosen

Dear Poets, 

I am writing to you for some clarity or company. At thirty, I have found myself in some kind of threshold state. I’m grappling with the tragic loss of a person I loved, mourning a future that got lost in the past, and also celebrating the births of so many of my peers’ new babies. I have been at the hospital witnessing—or on the other side of the phone hearing about—these big ends and big beginnings. I feel like I’m spinning: a compass who doesn’t know whether to point toward the exits or the entrances. Are the exits and entrances are the same? Babies come out of the holes in our bodies, surgical or anatomical, and loss feels the same way: I feel like she was torn from my body somehow, leaving an emptiness, a wound. I guess I don’t really have a question, except to say, does this seem familiar to you? Are you spinning, too? 

Thank you,
Caught in A twirl

Dear Caught in A Twirl,

So much of your letter does indeed sound familiar. During a bout of despair I once asked my mother whether growing older was just one wound piled upon another until we are just a collection of hurt, and she answered, unironically, “No, sometimes someone gets married or has a baby!” At the time I probably rolled my eyes or laughed at her stubborn optimism, but I have since grown to take her answer quite genuinely. My best friends are also having babies or getting married, big beginnings I am grateful to witness. And at thirty we are both already starting to encounter some big endings, too. I am very sorry for your loss. I want to share with you Robin Beth Schaer’s poem “Holdfast” which begins, 

The dead are for morticians & butchers
to touch. Only a gloved hand. Even my son
will leave a grounded wren or bat alone
like a hot stove. When he spots a monarch
in the driveway he stares. It’s dead,
I say, you can touch it. The opposite rule:
butterflies are too fragile to hold
alive, just the brush of skin could rip
a wing. He skims the orange & black whorls
with only two fingers, the way he learned
to feel the backs of starfish & horseshoe crabs
at the zoo, the way he thinks we touch
all strangers. I was sad to be born, he tells me,
because it means I will die. 

In a small footnote to this poem, Robin adds, “As my son encounters the world for the first time, I re-encounter it with him, both of us reckoning together with how to live and how to die.” I think that is perhaps what you and I are both doing: just trying to reckon with how to live and how to die. One of the ways to do the former is to take every opportunity to spin your compass toward reasons to celebrate. Just as you wonder whether entrances and exits are the same thing, I think celebrating is the same thing as gratitude. Your peers are having babies! Worth celebrating. You loved someone so fully! Worth celebrating. Even—and especially—when her absence feels terribly heavy. The world will do its part to spin you toward hurt often enough. When it is available to you, I hope you orient yourself toward joy. These beginnings, and maybe even the endings—they are evidence of how lucky you were to experience something miraculous, no matter how brief. Celebrating does not have to be in opposition to grieving. Both can exist inside you at once. The second half of Robin’s poem feels especially right for you today, and I most want to send you this line: “We should hold each other more / while we are still alive, even if it hurts.” Hold those new babies. Hold the ones you love, and the ones who love you. Spin your compass toward them.

—SK

*

Dear Poets, 

Almost a year ago, I was left with no choice but to take a really good look at myself. This looking grew into a commitment to tame my triggers and heal my traumas. Taking off the haters-gonna-hate armor I usually wear, and confronting my own shortcomings, has been painful. Right now, I’m stuck in a cycle of feeling incredible guilty for things I’ve said and done, and who I’ve been in my past. The voices in my head box me into my worst moments, instead of toward my ability to grow past them. I’m in pursuit of different voices—ones that will leave room for openness and transformation and becoming. How can I be self-critical without tearing myself down completely in the process? I was hoping you could help me find a poem to ground me in admitting the need to change while also holding onto the ability to forgive myself. To forgive, in general.  

Yours,
In Search of Forgiveness 

Dear In Search of Forgiveness,

I want to recommend to you a poem called “Under One Small Star” by Wislawa Szymborska, as translated by Clare Cavanagh and Stanisław Barańczak (p. 192) which begins, 

My apologies to chance for calling it necessity.
My apologies to necessity if I’m mistaken, after all.
Please, don’t be angry, happiness, that I take you as my due.
May my dead be patient with the way my memories fade.
My apologies for all the world I overlook each second.
My apologies to past loves for thinking that the latest is the first.
Forgive me, distant wars, for bringing flowers home.
Forgive me, open wounds, for pricking my finger.

This poem is full of both apologies and the seeking of forgiveness. The first few lines seem a little tongue-in-cheek to me, as though the poem might be making light of the very notion of seeking absolution, but very soon thereafter, many of the requests seem genuine. In fact, I love this poem precisely because so many of the lines feel like mantras I might repeat while lying in bed at night, berating myself for whatever mistakes I’ve managed that day. “Forgive me, distant wars, for bringing flowers home. / Forgive me, open wounds, for pricking my finger,” sit in my stomach like a rock. Later on in the poem, Wislawa writes,

My apologies to everything that I can’t be everywhere at once.
My apologies to everyone that I can’t be each woman and each man.
I know I won’t be justified as long as I live, since I myself stand in my own way.

And these are the lines I most want to send your way. You cannot be everywhere at once, you cannot be what everyone needs you to be, always. You cannot do all your healing or atoning overnight. It is not a straight line. There will be more failures and more hurt feelings and more doing to undo. But remember that you are also your harshest critic. You are the one beating yourself up the worst. You are the one most often standing in your own way. To quote Wislawa, “My apologies to great questions for small answers,” but my small answers to your great question are: just do what you can, when you can, and be gentle and patient with yourself in the same way you are gentle and patient with the ones you love dearest—the ones for whom you were willing to self-examine in the first place, the ones who are rooting for (and invested in) the healthiest, most honest version of you, and who will work with you to help you get there, as long as it takes. 

—SK

*

Dear Poets,

I love adventures. Be it small ones to a new coffee shop, or big ones to far-flung corners of the world. The joy of discovery, of doing something different than the norm, is something that energizes me and drives me forward. But what’s particularly wonderful is that I’ve met a lovely man to share these adventures with, and we’re getting married in August. I’d love a poem that captures the joy of adventuring with a partner in crime. Can you help?

Thank you,
Adventurous

Dear Adventurous,

I have a very small poem for you, but it is one of my favorites. It is by Rainer Maria Rilke and here it is in its entirety: 

Understand, I’ll slip quietly
away from the noisy crowd
when I see the pale stars rising, blooming, over the oaks.

I’ll pursue solitary pathways
through the pale twilit meadows,
with only this one dream:

You come too.

I love that this poem is all at once a prayer, a wish, a request, a story, and a promise. Which is maybe what marriage is, too. Congratulations to you both, and here’s wishing you a lifetime of adventures side by side. 

—SK

Our poets, brilliant though they may be, would like to remind you that they are only poets. If you or someone you love requires professional help, please consider the resources listed here. 

Want more? Read earlier installments of Poetry Rx. Need your own poem? Write to us!

Sarah Kay is a poet and educator from New York City. She is the codirector and founder of Project VOICE and the author of four books of poetry: B, No Matter the Wreckage, The Type, and All Our Wild Wonder.

© Ellis Rosen

Dear Poets,

My niece is about to graduate high school. She has had to deal with a lot the past few years, including the death of her mother. I’ve watched her grow from an infant into the amazing young adult that she is today. I see how she’s getting ready to navigate all the complexities of life after high school. She is a talented artist and poet, and I’m so excited to discover what she does with the rest of her life.

I wish that I could protect her from any unhappiness or difficulties, but I know that I can’t, and I realize that our challenges help us grow. Can you please share a poem to remind her that even though the world can be scary and contains pain, she is strong and resilient?

Thank you,
Proud Aunt

Dear Proud Aunt,

Throughout my life I’ve always been fascinated by the way in which, in the throes of my most miserable episodes, I tend to seek out anguished art, art indelibly inflected not by joy but by the strain of having lived and lost. It seems like the logical thing would be to mainline uplifting art, children’s baking shows and classic show tunes. But inexorably, when I’m sad, when I’m lost, I find myself searching for other sad, lost voices.

For a long time I thought this was maybe a particular strain of masochism, native to my own messed-up psychic ecosystem. I really wanted to stick my thumb into the wound, it seemed, really wanted to amplify my despair. Over time, I began to realize that this wasn’t necessarily straight masochism, but rather a desperate leaning into commiseration. I wanted to hear other people say, Yes, I was there, too, and I lived to make art out of it.

For your niece, I prescribe Joy Harjo’s “Remember.” The poem opens:

Remember the sky that you were born under,
know each of the star’s stories.
Remember the moon, know who she is.
Remember the sun’s birth at dawn, that is the
strongest point of time. Remember sundown
and the giving away to night.
Remember your birth, how your mother struggled
to give you form and breath. You are evidence of
her life, and her mother’s, and hers.

Your niece has been given a terrible pain to carry. But, you say, she’s also cultivated substantial gifts as a poet and artist. With those, I hope she’ll be able to alchemize her pain into experience, strength, and hope for the people who encounter her work. Yes, I was there, too, and I lived to make art out of it. All is in motion, is growing. All language comes from this.

—KA

*

Dear Poets,

I would like to see a poem for a skill I’ve picked up (unwittingly) from my mother: complimenting people in a way that feels insulting.

Example: Oh, another new plant? How … nice.

On behalf of daughters everywhere,
Genetically Passive Aggressive

Dear Passive Aggressive,

Stop that! No, seriously, here’s Paul Tran’s “Scientific Method.”

Though it couldn’t hold me, I clung to the yellow-face

devil as though it was my true mother and I grasped

the function of motherhood: witness to my suffering,

companion in hell. Unlike infants with wire mothers

I didn’t hurl myself on the floor in terror or tantrum,

rocking back and forth, colder than a corpse. I had

what Master believed to be a psychological base

of operations. Emotional attachment. Autonomy.

The poem orbits Harry Harlow’s famous “wire mother” experiments. Tran’s rending lyric suggests that the “function of motherhood” is to be a witness to suffering, a companion in hell. In an increasingly hellish world, it is a profound gift to have a mother with whom you can laugh, commiserate, joke. But can the two of you survive without making the lives of others more hellish? Here’s hoping you can find a way to move beyond “cruelty concealed as inquisitition.”

—KA

*

Dear Poets,

I am hopelessly searching for a way to become spiritual again. Once, poetry provided a way back into my spirituality. However, because of the changes I have undergone, including being far away from home, where it was easy to find spirituality, I’m now struggling. Could you recommend any poetry that speaks to this?  

Yours sincerely,
Poet in Exile

Dear Poet in Exile,

My poetry life and my spiritual life have become inextricable, that Venn diagram just one big circle. In writing, I’m granted access to some part of me, or some part of not-me, that is greater than my intelligence, bigger than my experience. The poet Chen Chen writes, “My poems are braver than I am, but I am constantly trying to catch up.” Even the most skeptical writers talk about hours flying by, or such-and-such a phrase “just coming” to them. It’s hard to speak about what happens when we write without mining the language of the supernatural because so often what we write seems to know, see, hear more than we do.

For you, I offer Fanny Howe’s “Yellow Goblins.” It’s a short poem, and it begins:

Yellow goblins

and a god I can swallow:

Eyes in the evergreens

under ice.

It’s a strange, gnomic poem, and the opening couplet, “Yellow goblins / and a god I can swallow” is among my favorite opening lines by any poet about anything. I have no idea what it means; in fact, I doubt it’s particularly interested in meaning. Maybe poetry itself is a yellow goblin, a god we can swallow. Certainly, it’s a kind of “interior monologue,” a “voice,” a “place to surmise / blessedness.”

I’m as confused as anyone about the spirit, but that confusion generates in me a passionate and insatiable curiosity. Luckily, there are millennia’s worth of poems written expressly around, through, and against this curiosity. I hope this bit of Howe’s poetry leads you to the countless other poets wondering and wandering alongside us.

—KA

Our poets, brilliant though they may be, would like to remind you that they are only poets. If you or someone you love requires professional help, please consider the resources listed here. 

Want more? Read earlier installments of Poetry Rx. Need a poem? Write to us! In the next installment, Sarah Kay will be answering questions. 

Kaveh Akbar’s poems have appeared recently in The New Yorker, Poetry, the New York Times, the Nation, and elsewhere. His first book is Calling a Wolf a Wolf. Born in Tehran, Iran, he teaches at Purdue University and in the low-residency M.F.A. programs at Randolph College and Warren Wilson College.

©ELLIS ROSEN

Dear Poets,

Two years ago, I came out of the closet to my family by introducing them to my girlfriend. They responded fairly negatively, expressing their disbelief (“we would have known if you were gay”) and disapproval (“it’s not something we believe in or support”). I have pushed back in many ways—bringing my girlfriend to family functions, being hypervisible online, and proclaiming the steadfastness and validity of my relationship in frequent and intense fights. In the wake of this, my relationship, which did not have a strong foundation to begin with and shouldered the normal fears and anxieties that accompany any romantic partnership, suffered greatly. The more unstable my relationship became, the more strongly I held on to it—I fought for her so hard in the public arena that I didn’t know how not to in the private one. At times, it was volatile and abrasive, yet I fought for it still. 

After two years of what felt like pushing the boulder of “us” up a mountain, we decided to call it quits. Now I am both heartbroken over losing her and losing myself. In her absence, I am struggling to find mooring. How do you mourn a relationship whose primary purpose was to validate your queerness, both to yourself and others? How do you maintain an identity in the absence of the person it was formed around? Perhaps most of all, can I keep her in my life without making her my compass?

Sincerely,
Broken Heart, Broken Self 

Dear Broken Heart, Broken Self,

I’m sorry your family did not respond with the affirmation you deserve. Your queerness doesn’t need to be validated. It is valid because it is. You need—you deserve—to find a way to enter the truths of yourself regardless of how other people see you. That is difficult, beautiful work. I want to offer you a poem I hold very close because it stabilizes me to do just that: Adrienne Rich’s “Diving Into the Wreck.” The poem begins with the speaker preparing for their journey by making use of the instruments the world has offered them:

First having read the book of myths,
and loaded the camera,
and checked the edge of the knife-blade,
I put on
the body-armor of black rubber
the absurd flippers
the grave and awkward mask.

As the speaker descends, the received stories—the book of myths—will not serve. The speaker needs to cast them off to find the truth they need:

the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth

You now need to let go of the story—the messages you have received about what counts as valid—so you can get to the thing itself: the truths of your own beautiful desire.

The wreck is a space where everything is broken. That is to say, it is a space where everything can be assembled anew. It’s a terrifying and possibility-filled place. Your former girlfriend is not your compass there. She cannot be the tool by which you navigate your own interior space. When we use someone else as an instrument in our own story, we do them damage. In reconciling them with what we need to believe about ourselves, we cannot remain attuned to what they need. And we harm ourselves, too, because we deny ourselves the power of looking directly at our own truth. I don’t know how or whether you can keep your former girlfriend in your life. That is, of course, something that is up to both of you. I do know, however, that as you take on the ongoing work of learning who you are and what you believe, you will be better equipped to move toward relationships—in whatever form they come—from a place of truth and generosity.

—CS

*

Dear Poets,

I have been submerged in a sea of grief since March, when my father passed away suddenly. He is my one and only constant thought everyday. His absence feels more like an echo than a silence. There is a void in me that I know will never be filled. But my sadness intensifies when I attempt to understand the pain of others, mainly that of my mother, who has lost the love of her life too soon. We live in different countries, and I think about her, about the heaviness of the word widow, about her broken mornings. How she has to make one cup of coffee instead of two, or how she sits at the table to eat alone every evening. Is there a poem about the pain of others? How we can carry it as if it was our own, hoping that this might lessen its weight? 

Sincerely,
A Sad Daughter

Dear Sad Daughter,

I’m so sorry that you’ve lost your father—and that your mother has lost her love. When I read your note, I thought immediately of a Ross Gay’s poem “Ending the Estrangement”:

from my mother’s sadness, which was,
to me, unbearable, until,
it felt to me
not like what I thought it felt like
to her, and so felt inside myself—like death,
like dying, which I would almost
have rather done, though adding to her sadness
would rather die than do—

This poem considers the ways we carry the sadness of those we love—how their sadness becomes our sadness, even as we hold it differently than they do. The jostling of the poem’s opening lines reflects the child’s motion, as they try to position and reposition themselves in order to find a stance that might allow them to support their mother without buckling themself under the weight of her suffering. As the poem ends, the speaker grows still so that their mother’s sadness might reach them. When the sadness finally reaches the speaker, it arrives with that particular kind of beauty that connection brings:

…when last it came
drifted like a meadow lit by torches
of cardinal flower, one of whose crimson blooms,
when a hummingbird hovered nearby,
I slipped into my mouth
thereby coaxing the bird
to scrawl on my tongue
its heart’s frenzy, its fleet
nectar-questing song,
with whom, with you, dear mother,
I now sing along.

Your father’s absence turns you toward your mother. Look how, thinking of him, you trace the contours of her life: her making coffee, her sitting down at the table alone for breakfast. What care limns your noticing. Perhaps, in time, there is a way to turn that care into company. Send your mother a mug to offer her a bit of happiness when she pours her coffee, send a sweet text when you know she is sitting down to breakfast—these are notes to a song you can sing with her, even across distance.

—CS

Dear Poets,

After an extended struggle with his health, my paternal grandfather passed away last month to little fanfare. My father’s sisters don’t get along so they decided, without deciding, that there would be no obituary and no services. While I wasn’t particularly close to my grandfather, the thought of his life going unacknowledged hurts in ways I cannot describe. Can you offer any soothing words?

Thank you,  

Craving Acknowledgement

Dear Craving Acknowledgement,

In her memoir, The Light of the World, Elizabeth Alexander writes about the period following the sudden loss of her husband:

I am feeling very Jewish, I keep hearing in my head, thinking not of my actual Jewish Jamaican great-grandfather but rather about a wish for a religious culture that reveres the word and tells you what to do … I want rules. I want the prayers to say every day for a year at dusk and I want them to be beautiful and meaningful. I want to sit shiva and have the neighbors come at the end of the week and walk my family around the block, to usher us into the sunlight.

Grief is an unwieldy thing. Ceremony performs the dual function of paying tribute to a person who has passed and mapping a way forward for those of us who remain. Ritual gives form to formless territory, offering us a route to the other side.

For you, Emily Dickinson’s “After great pain, a formal feeling comes – (372),” which insists on the possibility of a path through disorienting difficulty. The poem ends:

This is the Hour of Lead –
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow –
First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go –

Dickinson’s poem reminds me that time itself holds the transformative function of ceremony. As you move forward, you will remember your grandfather. If it feels useful to you, you might consider offering that memory an external form. Perhaps you might conduct a private ceremony. On the anniversary of his death, take a walk to a lake he loved—or one that you do. Plant a tree in his honor so that, if you choose, you have a flowering spot to return to.

—CS

Want more? Read earlier installments of Poetry Rx. Need your own poem? Write to us!

Claire Schwartz is the author of bound (Button Poetry, 2018). Her poetry has appeared in Apogee, Bennington Review, The Massachusetts Review, and Prairie Schooner, and her essays, reviews, and interviews have appeared in The Iowa Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere.

©Ellis Rosen

Dear Poets—

People say you can’t know a certain kind of love until you have a child. I hated when people said this before I had a child, but now I know it is true. My love for my daughter sometimes feels terrible and desperate and weighty with responsibility. But also sweet and tender and silly. I’m frequently irritated, sometimes infuriated, but nothing she could ever do or say would stop me loving her. I keenly feel the reality that she will leave me one day. Hopefully she’ll be happy, she’ll call home at least weekly, but that’s the best case scenario. It’s also possible, even likely, that—at least at some point—she’ll be distant and not return my calls and will discuss in therapy all the ways I’ve hurt her. And even that’s not close to worst case scenario. I just LOVE her. Even when she screams with all the vehemence her wild four-year-old self can muster that she doesn’t love me … even when she wakes me up at three in the morning … even when she writhes and wails for forty minutes because I didn’t have a quarter for the gumball machine …  This love is exhausting. It’s so ordinary yet extraordinary. Is there a poem for a mother’s love?

Thank you,
Exhausted

Dear Exhausted,

There are so many great poems of mothers loving and being baffled by their babies! Some of the better-known ones are “Morning Song,” by Sylvia Plath, or “Looking at Them Asleep,” by Sharon Olds, but today I want to recommend you a poem by Marianne Murphy Zarzana called “Saying Our Names,” which begins,

Notice how just one syllable—
say Jack—can expand and become
the world, round and whole,
when it is a child’s name
being formed by a mother’s mouth.

I’ve overheard women in stores and airports,
restaurants and trains, sprinkling their talk
with the name of a brand new baby or
a grown child, say Morgen or Nora,
Michael or Kyle, Joseph or Ava-Rose,

singing each vowel and consonant
so they stand out, resonate
a pure bell whether the tone struck
be proud and strong, a major key,
or a diminished minor note.

I love the way Zarzana shows how something incredibly ordinary—saying a person’s name—can become extraordinary when it is infused with a mother’s love. The way a mother can transform language into a conjuring or a celebration, the way her voice can be a major key or diminished minor note depending on whether her daughter is calling on a weekly basis or wailing over the gumball machine. Your letter was full of awe—at the way a mother’s love is normal yet remarkable, universal yet still specific. You have gotten to the heart of it: this is something that is common and earthbound, while still feeling holy. The final line of Zarzana’s poem suggests it might be both: “Is this how God says our names? Is this why sometimes when I hear the wind rustling through the trees, I turn and listen?”

—SK

*

Dear Poets,

I love my mother so completely my heart could overflow with it. I think this love is strange: we do not communicate and we do not force that communication. I’ve dreamed of reaching out to her though and telling her what I feel. She’s the world’s most wonderful listener, even in silence.

I know I am not the best daughter. But I want her to know I’m trying to do my best. Even if the place where my life leads isn’t good, and that’s all she ends up seeing, it is not her fault. I still love her with all my heart. In times when I’m unsure of myself, that is the one thing I am never hesitant about. Do you know the right poem I might be able to share with her, to communicate this?

With a little piece of my heart she has overtaken,
Devoted Daughter

Dear DD,

I want to share a poem with you called “The Lanyard,” by Billy Collins. It is a fairly well-known poem, in which Collins remembers being a child at summer camp, where he learned to make a plastic lanyard as an Arts and Crafts project—a gift for his mother. The poem ends like this:

She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard
She nursed me in many a sick room,
lifted teaspoons of medicine to my lips,
set cold facecloths on my forehead
then led me out into the airy light
and taught me to walk and swim and I in turn presented her with a lanyard.
“Here are thousands of meals” she said,
“and here is clothing and a good education.”
“And here is your lanyard,” I replied,
“which I made with a little help from a counselor.”
“Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth and two clear eyes to read the world,” she whispered.
“And here,” I said, “is the lanyard I made at camp.’
“And here,” I wish to say to her now,
“is a smaller gift. Not the archaic truth,
that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took the two-toned lanyard from my hands,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless worthless thing I wove out of boredom
would be enough to make us even.”

I wanted to share this poem with you because it honors many of the sentiments I think I recognize in your letter: gratitude for all your mother has given you, an inability to fully express that gratitude, and maybe even a little bit of shame at falling short (or in Collins’s case, an embarrassment at even thinking he could ever balance the scales). I think it is common to feel all of these things. When it comes to gratitude, I recommend trying to take small bites, instead of tackling it all at once. Instead of trying to find words to thank my mother for everything she’s ever done for me, I try to take opportunities to thank her for specific things. I manage to get my taxes done on time, and call her to thank her for teaching me to do my taxes. I write a poem and read it to her and thank her for listening. She comes to a show and I thank her for making time to come see me, for having encouraged me when I was younger and falling in love with poetry, for never discouraging me from following this unorthodox life path. Creating a practice out of gratitude is something she taught me. And it requires effort. I’ll never manage to cover everything, but instead of trying to find the words and time to give her an all-encompassing speech about all she’s done for me, I reach out just to say a small and specific thanks, sometimes just for a minute or two. Because of this, we speak often. And our communication feels honest and unburdened. Which is another thing for me to be thankful for.

—SK

*

Dear Poets,

My mother passed away from cancer eight years ago, when I was thirteen. Everything has changed since then, except for the sadness I still feel every day that my mother is no longer with us. I’m starting to forget how she looked, her eyes, her smile, her smell, the warmth of her hugs. I forget what it feels like to have a mother. I forget what a mother’s love feels like and nothing breaks my heart more than this. Is there any poem for what I feel right now?

Sincerely,
The Grieving Daughter

Dear Grieving Daughter,

I am so sorry for your loss. Losing a mother at any age is world-shattering, and thirteen is an especially vulnerable moment to lose her. I am thinking about the words of two of my dearest friends, Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz and Hanif Abdurraqib. Cristin writes about what she calls the “Dark Luck” of knowing other people who lost their mothers before she did, which allowed her to find what Hanif would call “siblings in a very specific grief.” I think the only way to hold something as impossible as losing your mother is to lean on the dark luck of knowing others (friends, or strangers/writers) who have also lost their mothers, who have found words you might hold on to. “I became more comfortable when I stopped talking about grief like it goes away,” Hanif has said. “It’s kind of an endless room with endless windows, and the view outside is just better out of some windows than it is out of others.” If grief does not go away, then maybe in reading poems we can find a window with just a slightly better view. I want to share Hanif’s poem with you, “While Watching the Music Video for ‘Only One’ at Midnight, Kanye West Walks into the Fog Holding His Daughter in His Arms and I Can See the Clouds outside of My Window Parting into Two Wings.” The poem is separated into three parts, but the final section goes like this:

Umi / it turns out that I am more than those who I have seen buried / isn’t that a miracle / it is midnight again / and all of my brothers / are not my brothers / not by anything rushing beneath our skin / or our skin itself / or the way our mouths curled up / in the darkest cavern of some bar / where everyone knows us / by the drinks we consume / but will never know us by our names / I call everyone I love my family / and no one has left me yet / isn’t that a miracle / on the walk home / I stole a handful of roses / fresh from the ground / and pushed them into my palms / until the thorn bit the soft edge of my finger / this is how I know you survive / to remind me / of things that should be taken / and things that should be left / I have your smile and nothing else / I am most you when I am wrecked with joy / isn’t that a miracle / I let the grass grow over your grave / until it ate your name / until the year of your dying was swallowed / until there was nothing left but the year you were made possible / which is the year I, too, was made possible / and isn’t that a miracle / even if you did not walk through a door / even if I waited for my phone to flash your name / to tremble loud on a table / with the arrival of your voice / this is how I remember you / as grass / as flowers / as anything pushing out of the earth / in the name of its own survival / I throw a handful of dirt into the wind / it blows back into my eyes / and, there / I feel it kiss my forehead.

It is not too late to write things down. What you do remember is still worth putting into words. It is not too late to look at photographs when you need to, or videos, if you have them. Tell stories of what you do remember. Let other people tell you what they remember. But also, it is okay to let her live in something besides memory. In your smile, when you look in the mirror, or in your laughter when you are wrecked with joy, in the grass, in the flowers, in the things she loved, in the things she gave you, in the lessons she taught you that return to you when you reach for things. You do not need to punish yourself for what you cannot remember, you do not need to punish yourself for the way time forces us forward. She is not gone and will never be gone, because she does not exist only in your memory. She lives in so many places in you and around you. Hanif’s poem offers this message back: “son, you do not have to be afraid anymore. there is no city that is not my arms. I am everyone who loves you. when we leave we do not leave. we are not gone until we are gone. son, do not fear death. I am still here, waiting as you best remember me. tucked into the corners of your loudest laugh. the stain of light that pulls you back to the place where I looked upon you and loved you first. come back, son. I have made room for you. for only you, always.”

—SK

Want more? Read earlier installments of Poetry Rx. Need your own poem? Write to us!

Sarah Kay is a poet and educator from New York City. She is the codirector and founder of Project VOICE and the author of four books of poetry: B, No Matter the Wreckage, The Type, and All Our Wild Wonder.

© Ellis Rosen.

Dear Poets,

I’m a young artist and writer—twenty-two, just graduated, and starting out on a professional career. I’m having some success: a few group shows, a couple publications, and a few readings in small spaces. For this, I am incredibly grateful. I try to celebrate these accomplishments and not continue to fall into the trap of berating myself for “not doing enough.” That being said, last night, a close friend and I read at an event to which four people showed up, the host of the series included. I got a lot of apology texts, and I understand. I, too, have had hard days and not been able to show up for other people. But the number of these excuses, and the silence, from a great number of other close friends has been a little disappointing.

I’ve got a few solid friends that are forever supportive, but they’re spread across continents now. I am grateful for all of these people, too, but how do I celebrate my accomplishments when the people around me don’t seem interested in celebrating with me?

Sincerely,

Forced to Toot My Own Horn 

Dear Tooting,

I’m cringing reading your note—I have given so many readings to empty rooms, to rooms where everyone was watching a TV or talking over me, rooms where audiences were absent or ambivalent or, worst of all, openly hostile to my presence. It’s part of the deal for most of us, and I promise you, as much as it stings in the moment, it will become your superpower. You will never be a writer who takes their audience for granted, one who gets onstage and half-heartedly drones through twenty minutes of material while your audience furtively checks their phones. Surely you’ve been to such readings—readings where an author carries themselves as if they’re doing the room a favor by the sheer fact of being present. What a blessing that this will never be you!

Today, I offer you W. S. Merwin’s poem for his teacher John Berryman:

I had hardly begun to read
I asked how can you ever be sure
that what you write is really
any good at all and he said you can’t

you can’t you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have to be sure don’t write

It’s a stirring remembrance and a perfect reminder that the external factors—publications, prizes, praise from friends—are unsustainable and out of your hands. All you control is what you make. That’s a clean-burning fuel. The more you can orient the joy of your creative process in making and having made, the more sustainable your practice becomes. All the praise, the readings, the audiences will become bonus occasions for gratitude, built on top of the bedrock gratitude for writing itself.

—KA

*

Dear Poets,

For the past few years, I’ve had an intense emotional and physical attraction to someone who is not my partner. Recently, I brought this up with my crush—it turned out he felt the same way—and we agreed that the best thing to do was to stay friends because he has moved away and I am with someone. We spent too long dancing around each other, and now it’s too late. I thought having that conversation would bring closure, but at least for me, it’s been painful. Please send any poems to help me come to terms with being here, in a place I love but where memories of him are everywhere, poems to help me feel at peace with knowing we missed a chance, perhaps, of something.

Sincerely,

Bad Timing

Dear Bad Timing,

I give you Peter Twal’s “The Moral Kicks In.” Twal writes:

Patron saint of stifling
anger on the rocks        Patron saint of politely            melting into this tomato        soup a spoonful at a time
& we speak        in fortune cookie all night               The next dish, a ventilator       An IV        dripping into something
already dead

It sounds to me like your current relationship with your partner may also be “an IV dripping into something / already dead.” If you’ve been harboring feelings for another, if you’ve confirmed those feelings are reciprocated, if you’ve spoken with your crush but not your partner about the situation, it sounds to me like you are, at least unconsciously, checked out of your current relationship. It’s not fair to your partner to keep up the facade, nor is it fair to you to neglect what has clearly become an overwhelming infatuation.

—KA

*

Dear Poets,  

My father was diagnosed with cancer a year and a half ago. His treatment was successful, and he recovered after surgery and cycles of chemotherapy. But shortly after the treatment, he went back to consuming tobacco, a root cause of the cancer he recovered from. He is incorrigible and far from being cognizant of how dangerous this can be. We come from a place where community rehabilitation doesn’t exist. My mother and my family are stifled and helpless. We love him, but his adamance and negligence are breaking us down. Do you know of any poems that could help keep me going through this distress—words that remind me to be headstrong and find a way out? 

Thanks, 

Headstrong for Papa

Dear Headstrong for Papa,

I’m happy to hear that your father’s treatment was successful—I can’t imagine that experience was easy for any of you. For you, I offer Melissa Stein’s “Anthem”:

We were all in love
continually. Bless
our little hearts,
smoking and drinking
and wrecking things.

I think about that line often, the little heart “smoking and drinking and wrecking things.” That’s a beautiful phrase for the terrible truth of addiction—there’s nothing you can say, no matter how emotional or rational or true, that will cure your father’s addiction for him, and there’s also nothing you can say, no matter how frustrated or tired or thoughtless, that’ll make it any worse. Addiction is its own disease, a storm contained entirely within the bottle of your father’s mind.

The only way your father can address his addiction is to decide for himself that it’s time. You say there are no community rehabilitation resources near you, but you might be able to point him toward smokefree.gov, which offers resources to build an individualized tobacco cessation plan, or an app like MyQuit Coach, which offers personalized plans and also badges and achievements. At the end of it all, though, will be your father, left to make his own decisions. You can be present for him, a resource and encourager—but for your own health, you need to disabuse yourself of the notion that you can singlehandedly save his.

—KA

Want more? Read earlier installments of Poetry Rx. Need a poem? Write to us! In the next installment, Sarah Kay will be answering questions. 

Kaveh Akbar’s poems have appeared recently in The New Yorker, Poetry, the New York Times, the Nation, and elsewhere. His first book is Calling a Wolf a Wolf. Born in Tehran, Iran, he teaches at Purdue University and in the low-residency M.F.A. programs at Randolph College and Warren Wilson College.

©ELLIS ROSEN

Dear Poets,

I’m in a stable tumultuous relationship. I love my partner dearly, and she returns my enthusiasm. Some of the time. There are days when I feel love radiating off her, and others when I could not buy a kind word or any showing of support. I realize all relationships have ups and downs, and I’ve come to accept and respect my partner’s moods. Still, I find it very difficult to cope with things when I am on her bad side, especially if I myself am suffering. I try my best to communicate this to her and not to be so sensitive. Despite knowing that things inevitably will revert to normal, I feel very abandoned and unloved in the moment. I’m not sure if I’m being unfair or overly needy or what. 

Kind regards,
Confused in Love

Dear Confused,

Your note put into language something I’ve experienced: a stable tumultuous relationship. One in which things are regularly turbulent and, at the same time, some joy or good love or possibility prevents collapse. Here’s what it’s taken me a long time to understand: If the relationship requires your smallness for stability, the relationship is not stable. You are waxing and waning to keep things from toppling. You are absorbing the instability. Of course, people are complicated. Intimacy is work. But there is a difference between the care of being with someone when they feel something other than joy and a relationship whose structure requires you to change your own shape. For you, a poem about honoring the shape of your own gentle impulses, Aracelis Girmay’s “The Woodlice”:

The beauty of one sister
who loved them so
she smuggled the woodlice
into her pockets & then into
the house, after a day’s work
of digging in the yard
& after the older ones of us
had fed her & washed,
she carried them into
the bed with her, to mother
them, so that they would have
two blankets & be warm

The tragedy of this poem is that one sister’s tenderness, her urge to care, is soon eroded by the older sisters who “know better”:

…& we,
being elders to that sister,
we, having seen strangers
in our house before, we, being
older, being more ugly & afraid,
we began, then, to teach her the lessons
of dirt & fear.

We learn these lessons of dirt and of fear—these barriers to tenderness—and then we name them instinct. Your first instinct, the one that is sensitive, that needs your partner’s love manifested through kindness is beautiful. Nourish that. You deserve it.

—CS

*

Dear Poets,

My letter will not be as eloquently written as those of other people who have reached out to you, but that ties to my problem. My roommate, whom I met a year ago and who has proven to be a kind and sparkling person, is in the process of losing her mother. I have no idea what to say. I know there are many ways to show up for someone who is grieving, but I would love to give her poem. I’d like her to know life will be okay without the person who brought her into it, but I don’t know if such a promise can even be made.  

Thank You,
At a Loss

Dear At a Loss,

A few poems came immediately to mind. I thought of Dorianne Laux’s “Death of the Mother,” which offers something about the knottiness of kinship, and makes space to hold the complexity of living within the devastation of loss. Every sturdy relationship also teaches us how to live without it. Its final lines: “You taught us how to glean the good / from anything, pardon anyone, even you, awash as we are in your blood.” I thought of Elizabeth Alexander’s “Autumn Passage,” which tends so beautifully to the dying body, it feels to me like it shepherds it into a gentle elsewhere. I thought of Tracy K. Smith’s “The Speed of Belief,” which moves with the not-knowing that death makes. And I wrote about one of my most cherished elegies here. But there is too much I don’t know. I don’t know your friend’s relationship with her mother. I don’t know the shape of her grief or how it will move or what she needs. What I do know is that you thinking of your friend, your commitment to being there with something that she might need, to being there even when you don’t know how exactly that will look, that is the balm. That is the buoy. The poem I want to offer you, to offer your friend, more than anything is Gwendolyn Brooks’s “Paul Robeson”

That Time, We All Heard It.
That time
cool and clear,
cutting across the hot grit of the day.
The major Voice.
The adult Voice
forgoing Rolling River,
forgoing tearful tale of bale and barge
and other symptoms of an old despond.
Warning, in music-words
devout and large,
that

we are each other’s
harvest:
we are each other’s
business:
we are each other’s
magnitude and bond.

—CS

 *

Dear Poets,

After a terrible experience with love a few years ago, I more or less shut off any ability to feel truly romantically vulnerable with another person. But now that’s changing! I’ve started seeing a man who makes me feel butterflies. He’s smart and kind and well-adjusted; he makes me laugh, and when we’re together, all the bad things in the world feel a bit less terrible. I’m trying to take things one day at a time and luxuriate in the joy of feeling this way—something I thought I no longer was capable of doing. But I’m also terrified that I’ll mess things up, and have my heart broken all over again (though I’m trying not to give that anxiety too much power). Is there a poem for me? 

Sincerely,
Allergic To Vulnerability (And Maybe Also Happiness?) 

Dear AtVaMAH,

How wonderful to be with someone who opens you to so much joy! When I read your letter, I thought of Kaveh’s response to another letter: “Now that I’ve left, for the time being, the proverbial (and literal) gutter, I find myself in the unfamiliar position of living a life I’d be pained to lose.” Nothing we love will last forever. Joy always carries with it the shadow of grief. Denying yourself happiness out of fear is only a way of clinging to grief. For you, a poem that refuses to make false assurances that heartbreak won’t come again, but that reminds us, in the words of Rainer Maria Rilke, that “no feeling is final.” Patrick Rosal’s “Brokeheart: Just like that” a poem I cherish for the music it builds:

What like—what may be—depression and
And just like that everyone knows
my heart’s broke and no one is home.
Just like that, I’m water.
Just like that, I’m the boat.
Just like that, I’m both things in the whole world
rocking. Sometimes sadness is just
what comes between the dancing.
And bam!, my mother’s dead and, bam!, my brother’s
children are laughing. Just like—ok, it’s true
I can’t pop up from my knees so quick these days
and no one ever said I could sing but
tell me my body ain’t good enough
for this. I’ll count the aches another time

Poems and music, in their compression and movement, teach us this: you might have your heart broken again, but you have this good thing now.

—CS

Want more? Read earlier installments of Poetry Rx. Need your own poem? Write to us!

Claire Schwartz is the author of bound (Button Poetry, 2018). Her poetry has appeared in Apogee, Bennington Review, The Massachusetts Review, and Prairie Schooner, and her essays, reviews, and interviews have appeared in The Iowa Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere.