We are each other's harvest; we are each other's business; we are each other's magnitude and bond. ― Gwendolyn Brooks
As we journey through political, economic, and global health crises, we turn to poetry to share truths that unearth underlying causes, illuminate impacts, and insist on transformative change. For many of us, today’s challenges are not new. The struggle of isolation, economic insecurity, inadequate medical care, deadly institutionalized negligence, governmental decisions that put Black, Brown, Indigenous, Asian, disabled, sick, and other structurally precarious people at greater risk are not new. Today, many more people are experiencing the vulnerability of these unrelenting issues. We recognize this opportunity for a heightened awareness of how our very survival depends on one another.
Poetry can help keep the flame of resilience, solidarity, and resistance alive in us. It can help us process and move through grief, anger, loneliness. Poetry can be a comfort when the most necessary actions are to rest and recover. It can remind us of what’s at stake, that our lives and legacy are worth the fight. As cultural workers, we know that culture shapes our political and social imagination at a foundational level. As poets, we can use poetry to map what is, what has been, and possibly, the way forward, including the reasons not to return to what does not honor and protect our lives, our communities, and our planet.
We asked poets to give us the words they chant to get out of bed, to raise their fists, to encourage their kin, to remind us, as this crisis does, that “we are each other’s business; we are each other’s magnitude and bond.” To read all of these poems, visit Split This Rock’s website.
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Four in the morning and I'mBy Lynne McEniry
in the bathroom worrying about a friend
with Covid and for distraction worming my way
through a FB thread of a person I don’t know who
liked a comment I made on the post of someone
I only know on social media because I made
myself brave enough to reach out and ask
her to be my friend anyway
and I’m reading the posts of this friend
I barely know to try to stop worrying
about the sick friend I know well and I’m clicking
on links of photos where this strange friend had dinner
last night and of the place her sister works and
the photos of her last vacation when I remember
the encyclopedia set my dad brought home one
night when someone had no cash to pay him
for painting their living room and he was damn
well pissed because he had planned to buy
a bag of groceries with food different from
the cereal and powdered milk we’d been
eating all week but as he turned to pick a
volume up to probably crash it to the floor
he caught me flipping through one and pausing
on a black and white of
a sequoia with a man and a VW bug posed
in front of it for perspective
and he was reminded in in my wide
brown eyes, the innocent O of my lips
that there was more than one way
to cure hunger and here on this
toilet at four in the morning I’m
reminded there’s more than one way
to lose friends and gain friends
more than one way to worry more than one way
that someone hungry can turn to past
volumes for answers for healing
Listen as Lynne McEniry reads "Four in the morning and I'm."
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