Getting the news from poems

Last updated on: March 31, 2017 at 6:01 am by Marilyn McEntyre

Getting the news from poems 2017-03-31T06:01:23-07:00 Marilyn McEntyre

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getting the news from poems

I mostly write prose these days, but now and then a poem comes, and when it does I welcome it, as any of us should when that heppens. Seeds of poems come when they are sent, and our work is to tend to them–to make something of the moment when a phrase or an image falls into our path and we pick it up and begin to play. Poems sometimes tug at my sleeve when personal celebrations or losses seem to deserve words. But they often come, too, after the morning headlines, after a new statistic about the war dead—Americans, Afghans, Syrians—or after a bleak report about glacial melt or species disappearing. It is difficult, as William Carlos Williams famously put it, to get the news from poems, but poems can help bring us to terms with the news, and give us a place to put the sorrow while we consider what other action may be called for. My political life and my prayer life have, in the past decade, been as deeply entwined as any time I can remember, though my whole life I have witnessed, mostly from the safety of a TV screen, the growing violence the past half-century has unleashed, and the unfolding consequences of unthinking consumerism. I thought this morning of a small poem I wrote after reading Barbara Kingsolver’s novel, Flight Behavior, which focuses on a rural community’s growing awareness of how migration patterns, pollination of crops, and food production are changing. Like so many other writers and artists, Kingsolver helps connect the dots between public life, planetary life, and the personal imagination—to help us take things personally enough to allow them to invade our consciousness and conscience.

I had recently seen a documentary, Queen of the Sun, about the demise of bee colonies. As I tried to take in the implications of changing ecosystems, I wrote a very small poem about bees:

The bee broaching

this flowering weed

alone in late afternoon

doesn’t know the hives

Are dying.

Her work lies between

these white petals.

Still, she may have noticed

how few butterflies

color the air.

My work, too, I realized, lies between the particular petals that unfold around me as the day presents its demands. That poem, and others along the way, have been extensions of morning prayer.

All of us live between the immediacies to which we are called to be faithful—family and work and learning and local errands—and the large, looming realities that could so easily overwhelm us. Poems are one instrument that can help us take heart, or as Wendell Berry put it, to “be joyful, though you have considered all the facts.” They can give us the will and courage to stay in conversation, holding onto the words we’re given, trying not to let go while we wait for blessing.

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