I often look to artists and writers to help me make sense of life. We are living in a time of great change and enormous upheaval and I want to believe it is for the better.
Each day in the clinic, I talk with people about this collective trauma we are living. While the pandemic is affecting all of us, the effects are very different for each person: some have suffered great personal losses—jobs, businesses, housing, and the death of family members. Others’ lives have been impacted by mask wearing, the inconveniences of social distancing while grocery shopping, or not being able to go to their gyms. The experience runs the gamut. Adding to the trauma of the pandemic is the reckoning of confronting race and white supremacy in America. All of these conditions require work to understand, untangle, and correct and none of it is an overnight fix—though many might like it to be.
During the first part of the lockdown in March which stretched into April, I came across these poems by American poet, Adrienne Rich. It felt as if she wrote them this year but they were written in 1991.
WHAT KIND OF TIMES ARE THESE
There’s a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows
uphill
and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows
near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted
who disappeared into those shadows.
I’ve walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but
don’t be fooled,
this isn’t a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,
our country is moving closer to its own truth and dread,
its own ways of making people disappear.
I won’t tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods
meeting the unmarked strip of light—
ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:
I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.
And I won’t tell you where it is, so why do I tell you
anything? Because you still listen, because times like these
to have you listen at all, it’s necessary
to talk about trees.
IN THOSE YEARS
In those years, people will say, we lost track
of the meaning of we, of you
we found ourselves
reduced to I
and the whole thing became
silly, ironic, terrible
we were trying to live a personal life and, yes, that was the only life
we could bear witness to
But the great dark birds of history screamed and plunged
into our personal weather
They were headed somewhere else but their beaks and pinions drove
along the shore, through the rags of fog
where we stood saying I
What poets or artists have you turned to right now to make sense of these times? I would love to hear what has soothed or provoked you these last 6 months.
Adrienne Rich, Collected Poems 1950-2012 (Norton 2016).