An Unusual Proposal

An Unusual Proposal

By Sylvia Sullivan Villarreal

I have an unusual proposal. Not one likely to be enacted, but one that might offer some comfort in a week so filled with pain and grief. Let’s take all the talking heads, the hosts and the pundits, and replace them with poets for a week. Let’s imagine that our air waves, usually pulsing with the sly and slick rantings of Howard and Rush, are suddenly ripe with the language and images of some of our unsung heroes. Allow the words spoken and transmitted to our ears to be the same ones selected, crafted, and then polished to perfection by artists whose lives depend on finding that precise noun or verb. Those whose impetus is to constantly pare away the extraneous, the sensational, and explicate in concise and moving ways the bare bones of our existence.

How could that possibly be relevant? In a week that contains a horrific slaughter of innocents on a college campus, more savage suicidal bombings on the Iraqi war front- how could any of this be helped by piping the voices and visions of our poets into our weary ears and broken hearts?

Consider for a moment the words of poet Mary Oliver, who appeared onstage here in Houston the very evening of the Virginia massacre. This slight woman, clad in gray yet somehow luminous, read softly from her work, including a much beloved poem, WILD GEESE. In it she invites the reader, “Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.” And later in that same poem, she reminds us “Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese…announcing over and over your place in the family of things.” The blackness, both experienced, and created by those who feel no stake in that family, felt palpable in that large room.

Perhaps we could really listen to the words of Naomi Shihab Nye in her poem entitled KINDNESS. “Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth….how desolate the landscape can be between the regions of kindness.” She continues, “Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.”

It’s possible that rather than another rehash of security concerns, and the endless, looping exercise of assigning blame to all guilty parties, we could let ourselves dissolve into loss and come out the other side, laying down our arms, and reaching out in the kindness born of sorrow, to all who suffer so profoundly in our world.

Or we might choose to listen to the voice of Pablo Neruda, who is no longer physically present, but through the body of his work continues to offer us his insights.

In his poem, KEEPING QUIET, Neruda proposes that we all count to twelve, then keep still. He goes on to state, “If we were not so single-minded about keeping our lives moving, and for once could do nothing, perhaps a huge silence might interrupt this sadness of never understanding ourselves and of threatening ourselves with death.”

Neruda implores us to do nothing, not for inactivity, but for the sake of recognizing what we have wrought in the world in so many “victories with no survivors”.

We have all been dulled by constant and repetitive analysis, by now we are saturated with the menacing images and psychotic ramblings of this young Virginia man. We hear stories of teasing in his early life, of increasing alienation in his young adult life, and we are puzzled and frightened by this morphing of a troubled teenager into a murderous man. We suffer with the families as they choke back their sobs, and we watch in horror at their vulnerability, at their unending and inestimable loss, at the harrowing possibility that any of us could be one of them. We know with dead certainty that only a thread separates us from sudden and complete sorrow. The faces of their recently life-filled children smile back at us from our morning newspaper, and the litany of their promise and potential in stark contrast to their sudden, violent end is almost too much to bear. This event opens the window into the black, snarling presence of the hate and evil that lurk in the world, and how they can be manifest in any of us.

We have heard from Katie, and Brian, and all the others who intone for us nightly the innumerable details, the ‘very latest’ in our collective attempt to try and make sense of events that constantly spiral out of control in our violent world. I, for one, have no more stomach for the constant stream-of-consciousness detail and one-upmanship that often passes for analysis.

To help ascertain the true impact of these events on our psyches and souls, give me the poets. At times of such despair, they help us name our grief, and remind us that even when muted in sorrow, life is a jewel to be prized. Perhaps just for a moment, their voices stir us to remember, what poets everywhere are always calling out to us. Attention must be paid.