--HOPE THEY NEVER END THIS SONG

 

 

 

Poetry Unbound  /  Padraig O Tuama, part 3, final

 

 

You is a fascinating word. 

 

Perhaps the world needs stories of how pain can sometimes continue in order to help those who also carry pain.

 

Language is a form of longing.

 

It never occurred to me that poetry couldn’t address the life of politics; it never occurred to me that the dead had nothing to say about the living; it never occurred to me that poetry couldn’t be a call to live differently.

 

So, mourning is a way of life, not just something to be done, then buried and forgotten about.

 

One of the things I love—but also fear—about poetry is that it asks you to name deep truths. 

 

These days, I tend to think of reconciliation as finding a way to live creatively with tensions that threaten to undo me. 

 

When I write poems, I feel like they ask me questions, and there’s no room for deceit—of myself or others.

 

It’s an invitation to community ritual; to sit and reckon with what happened.

 

Poems that try to be about everything often end up being about nothing, but poems that pay attention to one thing can have so much more to say.

 

I realized, eventually, that I needed to reexamine what I understood the word priest to mean, not only as a noun, but as a verb.

 

Taking this poem into your body you must meet it with the pace of your own breath: a poem about prayer brings you into the economy of prayer.

 

Who doesn’t have a story about laughing at the wrong time; alone, or next to a friend whose silent laughter was contagious?

 

The point is the practice, the using of the body to turn towards something that sustains life.

 

Not all my prayers name the god they turn towards. 

 

When was the day we were taught that gay boys are boys, too? When was the day we were taught that loving poetry was enough? When was the day we learnt that feeling desperately lonely, even when you’re ten, is okay? What’s the lesson for letting you know that looking at everyone else’s family and judging your own—feeling like they’re all together and you’re all apart—is okay?

 

We all feel left out in different ways, it seems.

 

Of the game Hide and Seek, the British child psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott wrote, “It is a joy to be hidden, and a disaster not to be found.”

 

Tension is a glorious thing, provided tension is not killing you.