Syrian refugees pulling up on Lesbos
Wednesday
A recent New Yorker podcast has alerted me to a timely poem by the Polish poet Adam Zagajewski. Poet Ellen Bass, who discusses the poem with New Yorker poetry editor Paul Muldoon, says that her family always reads the poem during their Passover seder, but I post the poem today because of the Syrian refugee crisis.
Although the poem appeared in the 1990s, it now seems to refer to ISIS and Assad slaughtering their enemies and to refugees venturing aboard boats that face “a salty oblivion.” Zagajewski mentions “the nettles that methodically overgrow/the abandoned homesteads of exiles,” and he chillingly observes,
You’ve seen the refugees going nowhere,
you’ve heard the executioners sing joyfully.
Bass says that the second line brings to mind Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song, about murderer Gary Gilmore.
Zagajewski struggles to find something to praise in this veil of tears. If the world is horrifically mutilated, can we find something in it to praise?
Try to Praise the Mutilated World
By Adam Zagajewski
Try to praise the mutilated world.
Remember June’s long days,
and wild strawberries, drops of rosé wine.
The nettles that methodically overgrow
the abandoned homesteads of exiles.
You must praise the mutilated world.
You watched the stylish yachts and ships;
one of them had a long trip ahead of it,
while salty oblivion awaited others.
You’ve seen the refugees going nowhere,
you’ve heard the executioners sing joyfully.
You should praise the mutilated world.
Remember the moments when we were together
in a white room and the curtain fluttered.
Return in thought to the concert where music flared.
You gathered acorns in the park in autumn
and leaves eddied over the earth’s scars.
Praise the mutilated world
and the gray feather a thrush lost,
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes
and returns.
I love the way that the poem veers between tragedy and beauty, revealing how thin is the line that separates the two. I think of how, after my son died, I looked out at the cat briar bordering the yard (our nettles) and marveled at how they kept growing. They were simultaneously barbed and green, life pulsing forth in a season of death.
I am also put in mind of the tribal medicine man’s healing words in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony as he seeks to cure Tayo of his war scars:
“But you know, grandson, this world is fragile.”
The word he chose to express “fragile” was filled with the intricacies of a continuing process, and with a strength inherent in spider webs woven across paths through sand hills where early in the morning the sun becomes entangled in each filament of web. It took a long time to explain the fragility and intricacy because no word exists alone, and the reason for choosing each word had to be explained with a story about why it must be said this certain way. That was the responsibility that went with being human, old Ku’oosh said, the story behind each word must be told so there could be no mistake in the meaning of what had been said; and this demanded great patience and love.
In “Try to Praise the Mutilated World,” Zagajewski chooses each word carefully and, in doing so, reminds us of the beauty that surrounds us, however fragile and evanescent. We must praise this beauty if we want to hold on to our humanity.
