Politics and Poetry

Without care, this Blog could become the Mary Oliver Fan Club site! But in honor of this marvelous writer, and while it’s fresh, at least two more of some 50 poems I’d love to share.

If you know her work, you’re aware that she probably writes less about people and the human world than any other poet, living or dead. So when she does slip in a poem about politics, for example, you stand up and pay attention. It’s not that she doesn’t care. More that she made the choice of placing the center of her life elsewhere, into the reliable world of Nature’s bounty, even with its storms and death and expected and unexpected terrors.  Consider this poem from her book Red Bird:

Not This, Not That

Nor anything,

Not the eastern wind whose other name

    Is rain,

Nor the burning heats of the dunes

   At the crown of summer,

Nor the ticks, that new, ferocious populace,

Nor the President who loves blood,

Nor the governmental agencies that love money,

Will alter

My love for you, my friends and my beloved,

Or for you, oh ghosts of Emerson and Whitman

Or for you, oh blue sky of a summer morning,

That makes me roll in a barrel of gratitude

   Down hills,

Of for you, oldest of friends; hope;

Or for you, newest of friends: faith;

Or for you, silliest and dearest of surprises, my

Own life.

On the opposite page is another, yet more political poem, published in 2008 (before Obama’s election), that doesn’t console at the end with love, hope and faith and describes so perfectly part of who we have been as a country and never more disastrously than today.

Of the Empire

We will be known as a culture that feared death

And adored power, that tried to vanquish insecurity

for the few and cared little for the penury of the

many. We will be known as a culture that taught

and rewarded the amassing of things, that spoke

little if at all about the quality of life for

people (other people), for dogs, for rivers. All

the world, in our eyes, they will say, was a

commodity. And they will say that this structure

was held together politically, which it was, and

they will say also that our politics was no more

than an apparatus to accommodate the feelings of

the heart, and that the heart, in those days,

was small, and hard, and full of meanness.

How we need poets to tell the truth!