Believing in Poetry

a Golden Shovel of “poets in their bassinets” by Lucille Clifton

Finding arrowheads, fixing fractures, poets
muscle through the memory of a tick embedded in
the back of a childhood to release their
dark parts: the empty bassinets,
the redemption that doesn’t happen even in a dream.
There are phone calls they remember a-
mid the forgetting, the splendid
in a dead story, the woman
they can rewrite or recast, the one holding
more. Is that why birds speak over
and over? The re-living of their
beginning—the wings yet unfurled, the wind, the being a baby
surrounded by nest, beak open, eyes
ready to love the one who returns, a
trace of I will provide the globe
hopes for. Probably, a god. A shining
someone who steps in, arrives in time with
rescue, an only-imagined possibility.
Someone
will come to save you. She
will lighten the air, the smiles,
wavelets in an endless sea. And yet, nothing has
changed, just a switch turned to
everything-almost-stopping but not, where you see
the world with perfect vision: This.
This. This. And the ground is golden with last light, and
you must report
it because beauty is there even if it
is covered with blood and
brokenness. There are joys. They
are there in
the worst places, their
scent being innocence.
They are the seeds of a new believing.
When we find out the worst thing that
can happen and we are still breathing, all
the worst things will
pile up like the dead. They be-
come the graves we know as
a mother, a father, a beautiful
once, each one as impossible as
the other. Some of us read hieroglyphics, see that she
is there in the curve, each bird, the falling line, she is
the falling, the whimper.
She might speak: Use
each little room you are given. Say, “See me.
I am part museum, part animal.” And you can use
ink or any me-
dium that swells into what is unknown and
known to add to the stones. Oh,
yes, you are here—who knows why or how.
Remember, this world is terrifying
and beautiful, terrifying and beautiful—say that
over and over, and she
will hear you. This is what she does.