Poetry Will Save Your Life

by Jill Bialosky

  On Friday nights, we sometimes celebrate Shabbat at their home. Every time my grandmother opens the door to greet us, her eyes well up. While I had lost a father and my mother a husband, my grandmother had lost her sister and her only son. She sees her son in us. As we sit around her dining room table, the room smelling of roasted brisket, I listen to their stories and watch my nearly silent grandfather, dressed in a white shirt, his pants held up by suspenders, pile his food on the back of his fork with his knife before putting it in his mouth, the way I learned they did in the old country. As I look at my grandparents, one at each end of the long table, I wonder what it was like for my father to grow up with them. Psalm 23 reminds me of the spirit of my ancestors, of those who came before me that I did not know, but whose essence live within me.

  PSALM 23: “THE LORD IS MY SHEPHERD”

  The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.

  He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.

  He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.

  Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.

  Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.

  Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

  * * *

  In Jewish tradition, Psalm 23 is recited traditionally at the mourner’s Yizkor service, the service at the end of weekly service to mourn and bless those who have died. The book of Psalms is the backbone of the Hebrew prayer book, and Psalm 23 is the most famous. Jewish tradition attributes authorship of the book of Psalms to King David. Many of the psalms I have said so often, I can recite them by heart. The verse is a part of my inner vocabulary. When I go to synagogue and recite the psalm, my eyes fill with tears in remembrance.

  The poet Jean Valentine says: “For me, there’s a likeness between poetry and prayer that is not so much thanks or supplication or other conscious activity, but the more unconscious activity of meditation or dreaming. The likeness lies in poetry and meditative prayer and dreaming all being (potentially anyhow) healing, and all being out of our hands. For me, poetry is mostly silence. The deeper the better.” What is it exactly about this psalm that is consoling? Is it our familiarity with it? Or the power of its words? Or its seeming innocence in the face of death?

  WAR

  MY CHILD BLOSSOMS SADLY

  Yehuda Amichai

  Every Saturday morning, my mother loads us into the car, ignoring our groans, and drives us to Hebrew school. We hate it. We dislike the uninspired housewives disguised as teachers who embarrass us when we stumble over our Hebrew. Why does our Hebrew book begin at the end instead of at the beginning? Sometimes we cut class and hide in the girls’ bathroom until the first hour of Hebrew school is over. The second hour is when we go into the auditorium for services and listen to the rabbi’s sermon. Afterward, while we wait for our mother to pick us up, and remarkably she is always late, we steal little pastries from the Bar Mitzvah reception in the lobby. Though I hate Hebrew school with a passion, I love our rabbi. His skin is dark and tan, and he has a soft, guttural voice that reminds me of my grandfather from the old country. His stories come alive when he tells them. I can picture Joseph’s vivid robe of many colors and the Red Sea parting. Every year he tells the story of Abraham and Isaac.

  Sarah and Abraham have a son named Isaac. God wants to know if Abraham will obey him, so God tells him to sacrifice Isaac on a mountaintop. Abraham loves his son without question, but he also wants to obey God. He takes his son to the mountaintop. His son carries the wood and Abraham has brought a knife so that they can make an altar. Isaac asks where the lamb is that they will sacrifice. Abraham tells Isaac not to worry. He does as God instructed. He makes an altar and a fire and binds Isaac to prepare him for the sacrifice.

  I grow frightened. Will Abraham kill his own son for God?

  The rabbi pauses for effect, and an eerie silence fills the congregation. Then he begins again. An angel appears to Abraham and tells him not to sacrifice his son. He has obeyed God, and that is enough.

  For days I think about this story. What does it mean? If I follow the Ten Commandments, will God favor me as well and save me from being the victim of terrible acts and sins? And if this is the case, why did God let my father die? Why didn’t he intervene or send an angel? It doesn’t make sense, and yet part of it does. It is this tangle—the shoulds and shouldn’ts, the rational and irrational—that seems to be the crux at the center of all the stories that the rabbi tells us. We live in a world where things make sense and don’t make sense. Life is a puzzle. Years later, I come across these deceptively simple lines of a poem by the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai. Its paradoxes fill me with curiosity and wonder. It reminds me of my wise rabbi whom I adored as a child, and who years later, officiated my wedding.

  MY CHILD BLOSSOMS SADLY

  Yehuda Amichai (1924–2000)

  Translated by Ruth Nevo

  My child blossoms sadly.

  He blossoms in spring without me,

  he ripens in the sadness of my not being there.

  I saw a cat playing with her kittens.

  I shall not teach my son war,

  I shall not teach him at all. I shall not be.

  He puts sand in a small bucket.

  He makes a sand cake.

  I put sand in my body.

  The cake crumbles. My body.

  * * *

  The Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai was born in Germany. He immigrated to Palestine with his Orthodox Jewish family in 1936 when he was twelve and Germany was under the control of Hitler. His poetry carries the anguished reverberations of history and politics. In an interview with The Paris Review, he reminds us that anti-Semitism predated Hitler in Germany. “We were called names. We had stones thrown at us. And, yes, this created real sorrow. We defended ourselves as well as we could. Funny thing, the common name we were called was Isaac—the way Muslims are called Ali or Mohammed. They’d call out, Isaac, go back to Palestine, leave our home, go to your place. They threw stones at us and shouted, Go to Palestine.” Growing up, Amichai went to synagogue once or sometimes twice a day. “I think religion is good for children, especially educated children, because it allows for imagination, a whole imaginative world apart from the practical world. The world of religion isn’t a logical world; that’s why children like it. It’s a world of worked-out fantasies, very similar to children’s stories or fairy tales.” Amichai believed that poets must live in the experiential world and not close themselves off inside their studios.

  This short, ten-line excerpt from a longer poem called “The Travels of the Last Benjamin of Tudela” is about the relationship between a father and a son. It could be Abraham and Isaac. It could be your father or your son. In the spaces between words we experience the passing of time and the legacy of generations and the paradox of instruction. Each passing day, a child grows older and his parents grow older. A father fears for his own demise and also his son’s demise. On the surface the poem is about watching a child make cakes out of sand, but it also illustrates the threat of war and the potential destruction of a people. For me, it recalls days at the beach watching my own son build castles in the sand, or in the playground in the park, and how quickly our illusory sense of security faded the day the twin towers fell in New York City and the threat of war pressed closer to our shores. Amichai said in an interview: “I’ve often said that all poetry is political. This is because real poems deal with a human response to reality and politics is part of reality, history in the making. Even if a poet writes about sitting in a glass house drinking tea it reflects politics.”

  What does it mean to be Jewish? In graduate school, at the University of Iowa’s Writer’s Workshop in Iowa City, I waitress weekends at a family-style barb
ecue place run by Midwestern farmers. One of the blond-haired, blue-eyed waitresses from Iowa City dressed in a red-and-white-checkered cowboy shirt with a bandana tied around her neck, tells me she’d never met a Jew before. Though she means no harm, I suddenly become aware of my dark hair and eyes, my eastern European blood, and its historical significance, and I feel a shudder of that recognition in my body. This poem reminds me of the meaning behind my inner tremble.

  PRAYER

  HAVE YOU PRAYED?

  Li-Young Lee

  I am young when my mother begins to date, and I worry about her. It seems as if every man who comes in sight of her wants her. And why shouldn’t they? She’s beautiful, with her long dark hair and curvy body. Even when we are at the grocery store, I see the way the men behind the meat counter stare at her, or the way the repairmen who come to fix our furnace or leaking pipes stay a little too long after they’ve finished to speak to her. What if something should happen to her and suddenly she was gone, like my father? I am plagued by the idea that I am doomed to become an orphan. I’ve come to think of it as an art, the way she carefully applies her makeup, pulls up her stockings that make her long legs look smooth and silky, puts her hair in big rollers so that once it’s dry it falls in a luxurious flip against her shoulders. Once she leaves, her arm hooked in the arm of her date, I sit by my bedroom window and wait for her to get home. My heart leaps at any car that comes down our street and sinks when it passes by our house. As the minutes turn to hours, I become more anxious, convinced my mother has gotten into a car accident. Sometimes my imagination brings me to tears. It is no wonder that I identify with David Copperfield, Jane Eyre, Pippi Longstocking, and other orphaned children in literature. All children do. My favorite babysitter senses my unease. Before she tucks us into bed, she takes our hands and we all form a circle on the shag carpet of my bedroom floor. She teaches us the words to “Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep.”

  Now I lay me down to sleep,

  I pray the Lord my soul to keep.

  If I should die before I wake

  I pray the Lord my soul to take.

  At the end of the prayer we say aloud the names of everyone we know and care about—our mother, our father in heaven, our aunts, uncles, and cousins—and every time we think we have exhausted the list, one of us suddenly blurts out a name we have forgotten, and slowly, aware I am not alone, my fear subsides.

  In bed, after our babysitter closes the door and sister number three has fallen asleep in the bed across from mine, I silently continue to recite the prayer whose origins come directly from the Bible. Before I understand what is real, what is not real, and what I only wish for, I believe that the soul of my own father is with the Lord watching over my family, and I can feel the essence of my father in the musty air of our small bedroom. I pray he will look after my mother and return her safely home.

  HAVE YOU PRAYED?

  Li-Young Lee (1957–)

  When the wind

  turns and asks, in my father’s voice,

  Have you prayed?

  I know three things. One:

  I’m never finished answering to the dead.

  Two: A man is four winds and three fires.

  And the four winds are his father’s voice,

  his mother’s voice . . .

  Or maybe he’s seven winds and ten fires.

  And the fires are seeing, hearing, touching,

  dreaming, thinking . . .

  Or is he the breath of God?

  When the wind turns traveler

  and asks, in my father’s voice, Have you prayed?

  I remember three things.

  One: A father’s love

  is milk and sugar,

  two-thirds worry, two-thirds grief, and what’s left over

  is trimmed and leavened to make the bread

  the dead and the living share.

  And patience? That’s to endure

  the terrible leavening and kneading.

  And wisdom? That’s my father’s face in sleep.

  When the wind

  asks, Have you prayed?

  I know it’s only me

  reminding myself

  a flower is one station between

  earth’s wish and earth’s rapture, and blood

  was fire, salt, and breath long before

  it quickened any wand or branch, any limb

  that woke speaking. It’s just me

  in the gowns of the wind,

  or my father through me, asking,

  Have you found your refuge yet?

  asking, Are you happy?

  Strange. A troubled father. A happy son.

  The wind with a voice. And me talking to no one.

  * * *

  Li-Young Lee was born in Indonesia to Chinese exiles. In reading his call-to-prayer-like poem, I remember the nights I lay in bed reciting “Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep, ” a classic children’s bedtime prayer from the eighteenth century. Prayer offers a door to a place where we surrender our literal and rational minds and embrace faith. In “Have You Prayed?” Li-Young Lee equates prayer and the spiritual world with his father and his ancestors before him. Though written across cultures and time, both prayer-poems invite us to abandon ourselves to the unknown and the dead.

  In reading “Have You Prayed?” I don’t attempt to parse it literally. Instead I allow its seductive voice to take me to the enchantments of the unknown world where father, legacy, and prayer are all intertwined. Surely this is one of the reasons poetry enriches us. A poem links us to a universe at once intimate and communal. Poets and artists work in solitude and by intuition. They have the same mission: to capture and fathom the reality beyond appearances, the world invisible to the eye.

  IMAGINATION

  THE SNOW MAN

  Wallace Stevens

  In Cleveland, Ohio, the winters are snow-filled and cold. Sometimes there is so much ice on the windows we can barely see out, and the snow is more than a foot deep. And what else is there to do on those snowy days when school is canceled except go outside and build a snowman? While my mother is still in bed, my sisters and I come downstairs and stare out our frosty windows at all the snow covering our lawn, tree branches, and bushes in a white shroud. We put on our snow jackets and leggings, hats and boots and mittens, and run outside, where the snow has not yet been tainted. We roll a small mound of packed snow across our front lawn until it grows in circumference and girth, first one ball and then the other, to form the snowman’s body and head. There is something eerie and subversive in the act: how we ransack the once untouched snow-covered lawn and leave it trodden and raw, exposing patches of grass and mud, to make the body of the snowman. Then we go back inside, trudging snow onto the carpet, cheeks burning from the cold, our mother still asleep in bed upstairs, and gather charcoal for eyes, a carrot for a nose, and a box of the Sunkist raisins our mother fills our pockets with before we go to school, to create a row of raisins in the shape of a smile. What is this need in us to transform snow into our own likeness? Is it that same impulse and urgency an artist encounters when she creates a work of art? Sometimes, after we finish building our snowman I stop for a moment. The wind burns my cheeks and I listen to its sound, which is almost like a voice, and it fills me with the mystery of the universe, that mystical sensation that makes me wonder: Why am I here? Who are we? How did we come to being? It’s still early in the morning and the snow hasn’t stopped. It’s so white and bright, I can barely see. It is no wonder that I am enchanted and puzzled by Wallace Stevens’s poem “The Snow Man” the first time I read it.

  THE SNOW MAN

  Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)

  One must have a mind of winter

  To regard the frost and the boughs

  Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

  And have been cold a long time

  To behold the junipers shagged with ice,

  The spruces rough in the distant glitter

  Of the January sun; and not to think

 
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,

  In the sound of a few leaves,

  Which is the sound of the land

  Full of the same wind

  That is blowing in the same bare place

  For the listener, who listens in the snow,

  And, nothing himself, beholds

  Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

  * * *

  In his essay “The Necessary Angel,” the American modernist poet Wallace Stevens wrote, “unreal things have a reality of their own, in poetry as elsewhere. We do not hesitate, in poetry, to yield ourselves to the unreal, when it is possible to yield ourselves.” This quote is a perfect introduction to understanding his poetics.

  “The Snow Man,” a beautiful elegy to childhood, perhaps draws on the iconic association of building a snowman as a child. Our reading of a poem reflects our own personal identification with the images and narrative the poem evokes within us. The snowman of the poem personifies the child in existential thought, seeing the world released from his parents’ reflection, aware suddenly both of his own insignificance and importance. Like layers of snow mounting in a field, “The Snow Man,” embracing abstraction, inhabits several realms of reality: the reality of what is seen, and what is not seen in our imagination. Who isn’t enchanted by a ghostly snowman on a lawn in winter?

  Of this poem Wallace Stevens said in a letter: “I shall explain ‘The Snow Man’ as an example of the necessity of identifying oneself with reality in order to understand it and enjoy it.”