A Late-Night Poetry Break
From Thomas Lynch
Around these parts, I keep a pretty regimented schedule while essaying. Trying to show up roughly once a week or thereabouts to give you the full monty. A couple thousand words or so of zigging and zagging and tap-dancing and trying to give you some bang for your buck. But sometimes, less is more, and we need poetry to stand up when prose fails to answer the call. We need a way to bottom-line it all.
I’m not a poet — even if I’ve written my fair lot of filthy limericks to my wife, none of which will be shared here. But tonight, while seeking to feed my soul-sick self, after several hours of ingesting the awful news — which is to say, the daily news, never not-awful these days— I stumbled on this restorative. From one of my favorite poets, Thomas Lynch, who by trade, spent most of his life as an undertaker in Milford, Michigan. Having regular ringsiders to death seems a pretty fair way to gain perspective on life, as you become much more cognizant of what matters and what doesn’t. You start to understand deeper truths about beginnings and endings, and how much of what comes between those bookends are trivial concerns.
So here’s a poem I feel duty-bound to share from Lynch, in the interest of not hiding my light under a bushel. It’s called “Local Heroes.” He wrote it right after Katrina, a subject I gave plenty of thought to myself, while reporting from New Orleans several times in the aftermath. But I don’t think of this as a Katrina poem. Just a general-purpose catastrophe poem. Or a life poem. Catastrophes and life often being indistinguishable. And those who can look both square in the eye can sometimes deliver us from our misery — or at least give us just enough lift to help us transcend the daily slog:
Some days the worst that can happen happens.
The sky falls or weather overwhelms or
The world as we have come to know it turns
Towards the eventual apocalypse
Long prefigured in all the holy books —
The end times of floods and conflagrations
That bring us to the edge of our oblivions.
Still, maybe this is not the end at all,
Nor even the beginning of the end.
Rather, one more in a long list of sorrows,
To be added to the ones thus far endured,
Through what we have come to call our history:
Another in that bitter litany
That we will, if we survive it, have survived.
Lord, send us in our peril, local heroes,
Someone to listen, someone to watch,
Someone to search and wait and keep the careful count
Of the dead and missing, the dead and gone
But not forgotten. Sometimes all that can be done
Is to salvage one sadness from the mass of sadnesses,
To bear one body home, to lay the dead out
Among their people, organize the flowers
And casseroles, write the obits, meet the mourners at the door,
Drive the dark procession down through town
Toll the bell, dig the hole, tend the pyre.
It’s what we do. The daylong news is dire —
Full of true believers and politicos
Old talk of race and blame and photo ops.
But here brave men and women pick the pieces up.
They serve the living tending to the dead.
They bring them home, the missing and adrift,
They give them back to let them go again.
Like politics, all funerals are local.
Let us be one of those. A blessing to others. Someone to listen, someone to watch….and keep the careful count.
Bonus Track: Bon Iver’s “There’s a Rhythm”: