A kind of healing: poetry for endings and beginnings

To be healed is not to be saved from mortality, but rather, to be

released back into it:

we are returned to the wild, into possibilities for ageing

and change. 

Healings2: Kathleen Jamie

 

Of course it’s not over yet. There is no Covid ceasefire. No generals signing treaties, no monuments, anthems or operas commemorating the millions of lives lost. Or, not yet anyway, and so far few are planned.

How and when do you mark the passing of a pandemic which is not yet done? Politicians stumble, their messages swaying between promises of better days ahead and threats of worse to come. The Covid virus is as unpredictable as human nature.

But there is poetry. And a kind of healing in words chosen to grapple with loss and grief and confusion. For many of us the yearning for new life is tangled with wariness of being ‘returned to the wild’. Can poets help us tease a way through?

This is my personal choice, a Sceptical selection of works which have caught my eye in a search for meaning and comfort. Some of it produced long before Covid, others emerging in the strange in-between land we occupy right now. Not knowing what comes next, there’s continuity in nature.

Poems of healing

You gathered acorns in the park in autumn

and leaves eddied over the earth’s scars.

Adam Zagajewski

Healing and reconciliation are themes in several exquisite publications produced by the Scottish Poetry Library. I open Poems of Healing  ‘a small treasury of words across the centuries’  says the preface  ‘…illuminating many different experiences of illness, injury and convalescence,’

In our febrile time, when Covid combines with manmade disasters across the war-torn world, there’s comfort in contemplating the rhythm of the natural world, the seasons, bird song, scurrying ants – if only we can take time to see and feel.

My eye lights on a poem by a poet I haven’t read before: Try to Praise the Mutilated World. (You can listen to the recording on the Poetry Foundation website.)  Adam Zagajewski gently tugs at feelings, for better and worse evoking emotions with images dropped quietly into place – June’s long days, wild strawberries, ‘the concert where music flared’, acorns in the park.

He offers comfort in the familiar which can feel oddly moving in our unfamiliar world …‘moments when we were together’….

The mutilations he sees in this poem are part of our immediate landscape too – in the nettles ‘methodically’ overgrowing abandoned homesteads of exiles. In ‘refugees going nowhere’…

Yet, there’s fluttering hope in the last few lines, with the grey feather of a thrush

and the gentle light that strays and vanishes

and returns

 Adam Zagajewski was born in 1945 and died in Krakow, Poland in March 2021

On the threshold

By the road to the contagious hospital
under the surge of the blue

William Carlos Williams 1923

When, oh when, will it end?  Like many others, I seek answers from witnesses of the ‘Spanish Flu’ of 1918-1920.  There’s no quick fix, of course.  I find no kindly reassurance from poets. In 2021 our leaders and scientists look forward to spring 2022.  A century ago, spring seems cold and still, even when the virus retreats.  ‘That corpse you planted in your garden…has it begun to sprout yet?’ asks a mocking TS Eliot in the Waste Land of 1922. He had survived the flu but hidden menace lingers.

The Waste Land is one of three poems analysed in a fascinating essay by Mariella Scerri of the University of Leicester and Victor Grech of Mater Dei Hospital, Malta in their Representations of the 1918 Pandemic in poetry.

They choose the work of TS Eliot and William Carlos Williams with the younger Ellen Bryant Voigt.  (Voigt’s ‘book-length’ Kyrie is inspired by her father’s childhood as an orphan in 1918.)  And while our pandemic has not coincided with (or emerged from) world war there are haunting echoes in the poetry which contemplates the ‘strangely permeable threshold’ between life and death.

‘Lifeless in appearance, sluggish/dazed spring approaches’.  William Carlos Williams was a doctor whose reputation as a poet was established in 1923 with the publication of Spring and All [By the road to the contagious hospital]. 

It is a stark yet pulsating poem. For Williams, life is defiantly persistent. Despite the ‘dead brown leaves‘ and the ‘cold, familiar wind’… new growth shoots in spring.  Against the odds, and with ‘stark dignity’… ’One by one objects are defined…’ 

Still, the profound change
has come upon them: rooted, they
grip down and begin to awaken

Returned to the wild?

Like Williams, Kathleen Jamie grasps that troublesome thorny word, ‘change’.  She handles with care…’a rose, a briar rose’…

Recovering from surgery in 2011, the poet had examined her own mortality, the visible change a line left on her body after treatment for breast cancer. Her beautifully simple language probes tenderly.

Healing2 is included in the Scottish Poetry Library Tools of the Trade: Poems for new doctors  It is also one of SPL’s lockdown poems and it is discussed with great sensitivity and personal engagement by Sam Tongue, one of the Tools of the Trade editors.  He was writing early in lockdown 2020 when we had begun to drop our guard, newly willing to share our human frailty, to become part of ‘a social net of mutuality, care, and compassion’.

So Tongue warns against treating healthcare workers as heroes because that risks relieving governments of their responsibility and denies the vulnerability of mortals on the frontline.   ‘I am having trouble sleeping at the moment’; Tongue confesses, ‘waking at 2 or 4 or 6am’, and Jamie’s thought of breathing light into the body is ‘a calming one, a line of light in a dark time.’ He concludes by praying that as many patients and loved ones as possible are indeed ‘returned to the wild’ .

Healing hurts. Recovery takes time. Awakening life is often a fluttering thing and all the more precious for it. As we proceed – some too carelessly, some too cautiously – through the (final?) phases of the pandemic, Kathleen Jamie, now Scotland’s new Makar, opens the door to the daylight reality of being human.

To be healed is not to be saved from mortality, but rather, to be

released back into it:

we are returned to the wild, into possibilities for ageing

and change.

Featured image: Witch Hazel, symbol of light and hope in dark times, picture Fay Young 

Further reading:

Kathleen Jamie essay Frissure, on Granta 

Poems of Healing: Everyman”s Library £12.00

Tools of the Trade: Poems for New Doctors, Scottish Poetry Library, £6.99