Gloucester Daily Times | Thursday, Feb. 18, 2021
Mark Twain, in his travelogue Innocents Abroad, learns about the Cave of the Seven Sleepers. The cave is at the center of an ancient legend of miraculous journeys, time travel, magic potions, a whole series of incredible events. Twain closes by saying he knows it is all true, “Because I have seen the cave myself.”
We need Twain’s humor today, another age of fantastic beliefs. Take your pick: white supremacy, satanic pedophiles, Jewish cabals, vaccine microchips, covid hoaxing, and, oh yes, stolen elections.
Believers have to believe. They must. Facts would make them unimportant, rob them of arcane, conspiratorial knowledge. Facts must be ignored, must go unwitnessed. Blind belief, gorged on Big Lies, led thousands of gullible thugs to storm the Capitol. After all, they had seen the cave.
Do you believe in poetry? Do you believe poetry has a place in an America torn by social, economic, racial and viral chaos? Can poetry still speak to us? I believe it does! Poetry’s place is not to argue; faith cannot be changed by argument or logic. Poetry’s place is to warn, to hope, to hold a light in the darkness.
William Butler Yeats, the Irish poet and Nobel Laureate was no stranger to political strife. He lived through the Irish revolution and served in the new nation’s senate. Here he warns of troubled times:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
the best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Walt Whitman, whose message was (mostly) light and love, wrote of our high, human calling:
Here is a man tallied – he realizes here what he has in him,
The past, the future, majesty, love –
If they are vacant of you, you are vacant of them.
Amiri Baraka, often compared to James Baldwin for his influence on Afro-
American culture, found grace at home:
Nobody sings anymore.
And then last night, I tiptoed up
To my daughter’s room and heard her
Talking to someone, and when I opened
The door, there was no one there…
Only she on her knees, peeking into
Her own clasped hands.
Miller Williams, an Arkansan who read at Bill Clinton’s second inauguration, had this to say
about American destiny:
But where are we going to be, and why, and who?
The disenfranchised dead want to know.
We mean to be the people we meant to be,
To keep on going where we meant to go.
There is much more of these poets in their many books. In the present darkness, I urge you to seek out these and other poets, to use their light. That’s poetry’s place.
SIDEBAR: The annual Poetry Without Paper contest, run by the Sawyer Free Library, begins March 1, 2021. It is open to all Gloucester students. Watch for the announcements, go to the library website, enter you poems!