A Poem Can’t Change the World (But It Can Try)

 

One of my morning podcasts that I always listen to is The Slowdown by former poet laureate Tracy K. Smith. She is so perceptive in her choice of poems — she rarely reads her own work, choosing instead to feature the work of others. This week, she has detoured from new editions of her podcast to surface older podcast pieces that grapple with race, identity and politics, and I’ve appreciated her voice in my ear as I do my walking and thinking on the world.

My regular morning poetry writing has been centered on the events unfolding in our country, too, although sometimes slant, as Emily Dickinson might say. I’d never suggest that a poem can change the world that way we hope — and certainly, not my poems — but poetry can provide another lens to better understand the self, the larger place we inhabit together, and the injustices, and the love.

I recommend The Slowdown podcast, that you allow a few open-minded minutes each morning with Tracy K. Smith, to let her insights and worries and words, and her voice, to sit with you a bit, and allow the poems she chooses to share to anchor, or maybe unsettle, your heart and mind as you start your day.

Maybe that is all we can ask of poems, anyway.

Here are my own poems from the last week:

It’s all facade
facing us —
beautiful windows
and bluster
quickly broken
by a handful
of ragged stones
and loud shouts

one lone voice
then two
add
threefourfivesix
then
seven, more
voices,
eightnineten
more, added,
add it again,
twenty
thirty
fortyfiftysixty

collective voices
as street symphony;

no voice
is the lone
voice anymore

such streets
some cracked
some beaten
this season
we stand
for reason
we march
for right
for justice
we shine
light, revealing,
an act
of believing
in something
much better
than this

History
sleeps not
just in the moments
we remember
but also in the moments
we choose for now
to forget

An Autumn chill
arrives on
the first of
June

Harbinger
of the beautiful
or more news
to subsume?

The world beyond,
sleeps, now
accustomed to spin,
perilously
out of tune

The danger
becomes us;
wrapped in a shell
of words we consume

Peace (rippling out),
Kevin

2 Comments
  1. Your poetry helps me. I hear a kindred voice, and that gives me hope.

    I feel helpless. There’s so much confusion because I don’t know. I don’t know the fear. I have not awakened every day to a fear of my life ending, by just walking. I have not fallen asleep with the fear of my life ending by an intrusion into my home.

    In my little and rural world, that doesn’t seem to be the case– not that kind of daily and nightly fear. Still, that is no excuse for not understanding that is the case elsewhere.

    Awakened
    to the voices
    shouting
    history
    we
    then waved
    past

    and did not change

    Aware
    of the voices
    showing
    history
    we
    now weave
    forward

    and must now change

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