This week we present poems by Dr. Pearl Ketover Prilik, who blogs at Imagine, Wendy Bourke, of Words and Words and Whatnot , and Sara McNulty, of Purple Pen in Portland , who is presently making a huge leap across the country to New York. Hmmm....will the name of her blog change, do you suppose? These poems seemed to follow a theme of accessing resources, both inner and outer, in order to withstand the cacophony of bad news that surrounds us. I thought we might all be in need of some resources at the moment, so here is a bouquet of possibilities for you. Enjoy!
as the departed but always present Mr. Rogers said...
some will say such is the sign of a soul
that will spare no cost to tear the
fabric of freedom forever -
some will say that terror is a gift of
love toughest that will lift all nations
to rise to their better selves...
I say that despite the fierce or flighty
Despite the deeds that dismay, taunt, or
Terrify - it is the mercy of morality that
Shall always open the jar that holds the
firefly to soar sparkling - and thus bind
all wounds despite origin of infliction.
Sherry: I love the brightness of that firefly, in response to the darkness, and I do hope humans and nations will rise to our better selves soon.
Pearl: “Fred Rogers often told this story about
when he was a boy and would see scary things on the news: “My mother would say
to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’ To
this day, especially in times of disaster, I remember my mother’s words, and I
am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers — so many
caring people in this world.”
Thoughts on “look for the helpers:”
Frankly on
re-reading this poem I must begin by stating that it seems raw and a bit
unclear, yet the subject which it addresses is a significant part of my soul
and a mantra of my very being and so, although self-conscious about its merit, I
am thoroughly delighted that the sensibility of “look for the helpers” did
resonate enough to be chosen for this honor.
The full quote above is by Mr. Fred Rogers, known to
many as a television host for tiny children and, in my humble opinion, also a
philosopher king for adults. Fred Rogers was imbued with, and shared a pure sense
of, the goodness that lies throughout this spinning blue orb of ours. He brought
to others a sense of reassurance and safety. Reassurance that spanned a
spectrum ranging from toddlers' normative terrors of disappearance and
annihilation (i.e. the terror of a sucking whirlpool known to adults as the
toilet) – onto the ability to reassure an educated aging middle-ager such as
myself grappling with another unexpected attack upon innocents.
This particular
poem was written on a recent Sunday morning following the attacks in
Manchester from my home in Long Island, NY, located within a country where common
values and striving for national ideals seems to have been distorted so as to
have me often thinking that I reside not in my home at all, but someplace
beyond the looking glass in a surreal Carollian world where Alice and the Mad
Hatter might reasonably appear. Yet that discussion, my friends, is a tale for a
different time.
At any rate, on
Sundays I typically rise early and take a peek at a handful of words that I
have tucked away for a “Sunday Whirl,” write a poem, post it, read and
comment on the work of others and return to sleep. The Sunday of
“Look for the Helpers” I don’t remember the precise words, but they coalesced
into the poem that is above. As a psychoanalyst/poet I believe that a handful
of words seem to engage and free my unconscious to coalesce into poetic worlds
sometimes completely mysterious to me or, as in this case, to articulate, to
consolidate heretofore vague yet persistent states of emotion.
Recently Sara
McNulty, with whom I am delighted to share this space, wrote that we are in a
tidal wave of information with a consequence that the “More knowledge about the
world is shrinking our empathy for it.” Perhaps my striving to reassure myself
and, I suppose, others, of the ongoing presence of empathy in “helping” is a
defense against the incipient horror of such a shrinking loss of empathy.
Although I do intellectually agree that this seems to be a quite possible
danger, I am witnessing and proposing, albeit perhaps through some rose tinted
lenses, that we humans seem to belong to a group as a whole that is driven by a
common core of cooperation.
Indeed I would
go so far as to say that “inhumanity” might be defined as
indifference itself. I continue to be fascinated and encouraged with the
willingness of those sharing a threat to life and limb to help one another
- be it terrorism, tsunami, earthquake, hurricane, pandemic ...there always seem
to be those there to dig through rubble with bare
hands, to wipe ash from eyes stun shocked with trauma, those who will carry
bodies streaming with blood or corpses already cold. I watch, in cheering
optimism for us all, as fellow humans dive into rising waters of mayhem to pull
one another to safe harbors, both actual and metaphysical. “We” are for the most
part a cooperative lot. It is the absence of cooperation, the indifference
or even at the fringes those who seek to inflict suffering, that gets our
attention. There are always the helpers rising through ash, or dust, or smoke
or terrorized stampede - always the helpers and always this intrinsic call for
connection and cooperation that engages us in a fabric of humanity and
reactivation of hope even in the most desperate of situations.
This intrinsic
empathy and drive toward connection and help is, I believe, why we are
fascinated when we see such in the animal kingdom: not because the behavior, say, of elephants assisting a new mother post partum is different from
us, but because we hone in on an essential familiarity - what we refer to as
"human" or more properly "humane" behavior.
We are
terrified when terrorized by the lack of care for another by a member of our
own specie - be that the chilling indifference of the, by now, archetypal waving
left or right by a sepia colored, Nazi pointing in chilling indifference toward
life or death, or the youngster with a cause of hatred plunging into a crowd
with murder on the mind.
Certainly there
exist those who are disturbed and distorted by hatred and murderous rage, but
the helpers among them and essential light of hope always outnumbers these
outliers ...and so even in the midst of the horrific spectre of recent images
from Manchester, from Paris, from Germany, from Syria and so on and on
throughout the globe, playing as bizarre entertainment on endless loops of cable
news – I find hope sparkling like so many fireflies.
I truly believe
that it is this “light” that sparkles within all and know that even if times
seem dark and desperate, the firefly perhaps apparently invisible in the
brightest frightening blaze of anger will soar and sparkle in the darkest night
- symbol of a collective spirit far greater than any created perverse
distortion of what I believe to be essential humanness.
Yes there shall
perhaps forever be that which terrifies and threatens and indeed actualizes
harm but always the helpers outnumber the hatred. So, it has always been and so
it shall always be as long as we look to the helpers and see that they are
always there and remember that we are always on call.
Sherry: This does give great hope, Pearl. I have noted this quality in humans also, in the midst of every trauma, the hands reaching out to help others. Thank you for reminding us of this.
Wendy recently wrote a poem of hope, as well. This time looking at ourselves as ones who can make a difference in the corners where we are. Let's take a peek.
I Am the Difference
I am the difference in my day …
and like the little Steller's Jay
– I’d spotted in the garden plot –
took flight, not thinking it could not …
I too, am master of my way
the bird soared passed the birch trees’ sway
and billowed boughs and lawn hose spray –
and as I watched its path, I thought,
I am the difference
I am the difference in my day –
the gentle word, the kinder way,
the meal shared, the child taught,
the hug, the smile, the good fight fought,
with soldier-on and plug-away …
I am the difference
Sherry: I so love this poem! It is true, we are the only ones who can make a difference in our day, with the spirit in which we rise to meet it.
Wendy: 'I am the
difference’ came out of my interest in classical forms – and is a Rondeau. Although, I write a lot of free verse poetry,
I do try to remain open to all forms of poetic expression and have tried my hand
– or rather, my pen – at many of them. A lot of classical forms employ various types
of repetition which creates an impactful, and often mesmerizing echoing effect,
as the poem unfolds. Poets who use
repetition in their work (and several poets at Poets United do) know that the choice
of the repetitive phrase is critical. As
I have pursued classical forms I have become much more attuned to phrases that
I find strong and evocative and when they 'find me’, it is kind of an “aha
moment”. The words: ‘I am the difference’,
was such a phrase – and when it ‘found me’ the poem began to crystalize in my
mind.
American
revolutionary Thomas Paine once famously said: “These are the times that try
men’s souls” and I think that quote is as applicable today as it was in the 18th
century. There is growing frustration
that – not only are issues such as climate change and human rights – not being
addressed; in many instances regressive measures are being put in place. In this atmosphere of upheaval and
frustration, I had (and continue to have) a growing sense that we can at least
– indeed, we must – begin to take more personal responsibility. I asked myself: is there anything that
individuals can do to make even a small difference? And the answer I came to was “Yes”.
I began the poem with an observation about the
Steller’s Jay (the provincial bird of BC, by the way). My point was that if a little bird possesses
some sort of instinct or will to fly off, how much more capable of being self-determinate
– in our actions – must human beings be.
As the ancient Chinese proverb
says: “a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” Even the most difficult undertaking has a
starting point. And so, in the third
stanza, I put forth very small positive
gestures – my thinking being that, if we all proceeded with small positive
steps, even the toughest challenges facing humankind would see improvement.
Sherry: Wise words, my friend. Thank you.
I took some comfort from Sara's poem about the constancy of nature, so steady in the midst of all man-made cacophony.
Blood fills, spills
into my brain. No
drain for inhumanity,
war, famine, homelessness,
and sheer stupidity.
Must protect my heart,
keep it apart from daily
horrors, and circus acts.
I look to enduring news–
nature’s colors. Paint
my heart in green grass,
gold sun, purple irises,
and pink peonies. Seek
out smiles, strain to hear
laughter. Cannot imagine
a hereafter.
Sherry: The imagery is so beautiful in this poem, Sara - nature's palette in counterpoint to the dark doings of humankind.
Sara: The amount of news we are now confronted with is immense. In 2011, information scientists deduced that Americans took in five times as much information every day as they did in 1986‚the equivalent of 175 newspapers (See Daniel Levitin, The Organized Mind). And that was before the advent of social media. (In a 2016 Pew Research poll, 44 percent of Americans say they get their news from Facebook.) Yet the information glut is far more from other fields of entertainment, like streaming movies, gaming and porn.
For one thing, most of poetry’s news comes from the heart, a place that is too serious for idle entertainment and far too deadly earnest to waste energy on fake news.
And although a poem can be elaborately tuned, poetry remains naked communication— simple, honest and direct.
Poetry has few ulterior motivations. It sells nothing and is paid less.
Then there is the sense of what the novelist E.L. Doctorow called bearing witness to a magnitude. Our poems are the Rorschach prints of our age. We write the news about the news, in synesthesiac detail.
Finally, there is great economy in the news brought by poetry. News is a gift brought back from the Otherworld, it is the knowledge that is hard to attain. This is news the world can use.
So let’s write about the news. What is the news that poetry brings to the world? When did some news suddenly change your world, and how? What is it like to live in a news-saturated world? How is our sense of reality changing with the silos that have formed with such different ways of seeing things? How to bridge that gap between knowledge and action?
And what about the soul’s, the heart’s news? Do things we learn from inner sources differ than news of the world? Is there such a thing as a glut of soul news?
What about news we get from afar – the Otherworld, the hearts of our beloveds, the dead?
And in this time when national news is breaking by the seeming hour, what is the news of the tribe’s enduring and seasoning and becoming?
One criticism of this glut is that the more we know, the less we do. This was argued by Ned Postman in his 1984 book Amusing Ourselves To Death, a diatribe against the killing effect of TV entertainment culture on public discourse. (It is frighteningly prescient of our Internet age, as Megan Garber recently illustrated in The Atlantic.) In an news-saturated universe, “most of (it) is inert, consisting of information that gives us something to talk about but cannot lead to any meaningful action.” “We have here a great loop of impotence: The news elicits from you a variety of opinions about which you can do nothing except to offer them as more news, about which you can do nothing.”
In the Internet age, there has also been a devaluing of the truth in news as consumers of news have infinite choice in their sources, many of which prize attention over reality. Very gripping report on the alt-right and related online hate groups from Data & Society titled “Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online.” (The worst bit of news there is that a growing sub-tribe mixes real hate with just-kidding-irony so that there is no way to know whether an utterance is odious or offensively tedious.)
More knowledge about the world is shrinking our empathy for it. This was demonstrated in a 2007 study of online dating where participants were given more and less information about their prospective partners. Ambiguity was the clear winner. The where the researchers concluded, “Although people believe that knowing leads to liking, knowing more means liking less.” Worse for all of us, the more our tribe thinks they know about each other, the sharper our sense of difference, the easier it attaches to filter bubbles where everyone seems the same.
Sherry: It does get overwhelming. But we have to stay alert and aware. When news is so distracting, it offers the potential for sleight-of-hand behind the scenes, and the public only becomes aware after the fact.
Thank you, Sara, for adding your voice to the conversation. And I hope your move goes wonderfully for you. We look forward to the poems you will write in your new location.
Thank you, ladies, for starting our week off with such thoughtful writing. You give us much to think about.
Do come back, my friends, to see who we talk to next. Who knows? It might be you!
