Hello my friends,
I’ve been away for a few weeks on school holidays (partly away from home, also away from work and attempting to be away from technology) so I had a post all scheduled in for todays Friday round up.
But I went to give it a cursory check back over last night (couldn’t help myself) and somehow found myself sat down again typing.
You see, the poem I thought I ‘needed’ to write a few weeks ago instructed me to take myself less seriously. Asked me to remember to take care of myself. Reminded me that I didn’t want to ‘get through’ the days that are long and a bit relentless when at home with four children and all their differing (and in one case, fairly demanding) needs, and rather ‘get in’ them. Accept that yes some days are hard but also often full of surprises and plenty of joy, undoubtedly reasons for gratitude. And yes, I did need this poem. It would be a helpful pause point.
And yet, over the past two weeks I have written two poems, neither of which were that poem. Two poems, plus a ton of scribbles about ordinary-not-ordinary things that I hope will become a third at some point.
Both the poems I wrote were about Gaza.
I’m not entirely happy with either of them (yet) but there are plenty of people who have found words far more powerful than mine anyway. Poetry by Palestinian poets, like this one by Mohammed El-Kurd:
And I am telling you this why?
Because it made me reflect that sometimes the poems we need to hear, or we need to write are cathartic poems because they tend to our soul. They reassure. Maybe they remind us of what is important or speak to us kindly. They are a sort of balm.
And sometimes, they are cathartic because they say something that we cannot not say. They release or articulate our anger or heartbreak, even our feelings of helplessness. Or they communicate our desire for change. If we choose to share them, our need to let others know that they are not alone. We might need to write them because we need to hear them and also because we need others to hear them.
And when others do respond, of course that might make the world feel a little more palatable. It can be used as fuel to go again. Write more. Read more. Listen more. Say and do more, potentially.
I didn’t write the poem I thought I needed to hear this week because there were more pressing poems asking for my attention. I needed to write (more) poems about Gaza because I believe so deeply in my heart that there is no such thing as a ‘legally killed child’ (see this post about the terminology used in The Atlantic, by
), because this war has to end, because I believe we must bear witness.I’ve possibly gone a bit off topic here, but I always try to write honestly about how a prompt is playing out for me. I guess what I’m trying to say is that sometimes what you think you need and what you actually need are two different things!
Here are a few poems that I do think touch upon the cathartic nature of poetry writing. Hopefully there will be more in the comments also…
Coda, by American poet Dorothy Parker.
Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night, by Dylan Thomas.
Hope is the thing with feathers, by Emily Dickinson. Yes, a poem that has been widely shared across social media. But for good reason?!
The Thing Is, by Ellen Bass from her 2002 collection, Mules of Love.
Tell me - what’s your favourite go-to poem for when your soul needs a little love and attention? Is there a poem you return to regularly that feels like a long-held hug? I’d love to know.
Or do you have something to share following our prompt on Sunday - which asked us to write the poems we needed to hear. If you have something to share on this front too, please do…
Nelly x
(Sorry just finished writing this comment and coming back to say at the start that I’ve written another essay this morning 🙈)
Thank you for sharing this Nelly and for your honesty. It is horrifying to bear witness to what is going on and to feel useless, I keep trying to find ways to help but I do feel powerless. 💔 I wrote a short poem on it last week too, which I shared on Instagram, about the contrast between my children and the children in Gaza. It’s devastating.
On this week - I really adore the Ellen Bass poem 🥰 When you first said the prompt I actually thought of Wendy Cope’s The Orange again as my “comfort” poem, which I’d talked about last week, so then I was trying to think of another poem to share. It’s not exactly a tonic or balm, but I return to it often -
To the Woman Crying Uncontrollably in the Next Stall
BY KIM ADDONIZIO
If you ever woke in your dress at 4am ever
closed your legs to someone you loved opened
them for someone you didn’t moved against
a pillow in the dark stood miserably on a beach
seaweed clinging to your ankles paid
good money for a bad haircut backed away
from a mirror that wanted to kill you bled
into the back seat for lack of a tampon
if you swam across a river under rain sang
using a dildo for a microphone stayed up
to watch the moon eat the sun entire
ripped out the stitches in your heart
because why not if you think nothing &
no one can / listen I love you joy is coming
***
I love this poem because it feels like it distils the experience of being a woman in the modern world — all these moments that make us human, vulnerable, messy. It has a wild and free feeling, especially with the lack of punctuation and grammar. This is stuff that I love to write about myself, the things that make you glad to be alive. What I’ve written in response doesn’t really feel like a poem but I thought I’d share it anyway! It maybe feels like a little jarring when we are talking about the horrors of genocide, but I suppose that’s the complexity of living through this time, like both things can be true? I don’t know.
How do we survive with all this mess —
the pain of vulnerability
and all the marvellous, terrifying
experiences that humanity holds?
How do we cope with the wild, vivid
heartache of being a woman in this world?
The answer always comes
in the form of other women.
Open the door: she’s listening,
waiting to lift you up.
She’s been you
and she sees you
and she holds you.
Thank you Nelly. You word the dissonance so well.
I’ve been thinking about The Clearing by Martha Postlewaite: https://www.gowildinstitute.org/clearing/
How she writes about wanting to save the whole world and how alongside that tending to our lives, our days, our nervous systems feels so small but the power there is in this base…
I felt horribly, viscerally triggered out of the blue a week or two ago and wrote something that felt good to write but does feel a bit lacking in description….
*A poem when triggered*
May the tips of my toes know the tender but solid, sturdy ground beneath them
May my chest rise and fall in fluent, steady motion: filling, emptying, filling, softening.
May my hands know reassuring points of contact: temperature, pressure, texture, reminders of their place with me.
May interactions be soft, simple and filled with a gentle, comforting, ordinariness.
May I sense patience more readily than urgency. The urgency that was once my body striving for my safety - an army in defence of one so precious now standing down to rest.
May I know the presence of trusted ones who somehow lift some weight off my nervous system, allowing it to breathe.
May I connect with a small joy, something that I love and may that connection soothe my senses, reminding me of goodness here.
It’s sort of grown since then as I realised all of these things are soothed for me in a forest . It’s a bit long so I won’t post it here but it starts with:
🌳I go to the Forest for the Forest Holds Me
I go to the forest, for the forest holds me,
set my steps to the rhythm of the woodland floor. There’s a place for each footprint amongst raised, stedfast roots.
May the tips of my toes know the tender but solid, sturdy ground beneath them.
Bracken and birch send safety signals through their scented air.
May my chest rise and fall in fluent, steady motion: filling, emptying, filling, softening….