Hi, everyone. Let’s look at a poem.

Guilty

I declare myself guilty of not having made,
with these hands they gave me, a broom.
Why have I made no broom?
Why was I given hands?

What good have they been
if all I ever did was
watch the stir of the grain,
listen to the wind,
and did not gather straws
still green in the earth
for a broom,
not set the soft stalks to dry
and bind them
in a gold bundle,
and did not lash a wooden stick
to the yellow skirt
till I had a broom for the paths?

So it goes:
how did my life
get by
without seeing, and learning,
and gathering and binding
the basic things?

It’s too late to deny
I had the time,
the time,
yet the hands were lacking,
so how could I
aim for greatness
if I was never able
to make
a broom,
not one,
not even one?

- Pablo Neruda
Translated by John Felstiner

What good is art? What use is art?

The speaker in this poem (assuming that the “I” in a poem is always the poet themselves will steer you wrong) is questioning their life’s work. They spent their time not making tools, things that ordinary people use, but making the ephemeral, making poems. And poems don’t clean the floor. It’s the lack of use, of making something useful that feeds the sense of guilt.

In our world where everything from your car to your anger is a resource, where time spends like money (where it is literally money), making art can feel indefensible.

But poems, and art broadly is, of course, indispensable. It may not clean the floors, but it freshens the spirit. Art expands the imagination. It allows caged creatures to see the bars for what they are, and to reach beyond them. It lets us hear from the not-ever-as-foreign-as-you-might-think country called Other People’s Minds. The speaker may not have gathered and bound straw, but they have gathered and bound words and lines and stanzas into a tool at least as necessary to human flourishing as a broom is.

not even one?

Other people’s poems can feel like they were alive inside you, pooled there, inert, your whole life and then suddenly you read the lines and that poem that it turns out has been sitting there your whole life gushes up in a column and transforms, now jagged, rawly familiar in the mind, a cool and heavy crown sitting just above your ears.

so how could I 
aim for greatness

Poems are a summoning.

By “summoning” I mean a precise, arcane ritual designed in candle-lit eons past by ordinary people who caught in their vision a perverse or comely twist of light that they needed to tell about. They awoke to distant tumbling thunder, witnessed numberless stars above, and they reached for the words to describe it. They framed themselves in the mouth of caves lit on and on by dancing fire and moved. Drank the dregs to empty another bottle for catching fireflies. You read the words—preferably aloud, preferably in a still room, preferably with the stars aligned—and you summon another moment, another feeling, another vision.

A spell waiting to be cast.

Do you have any poems you return to? Any that have shaken your imagination? I’d love to read them!

A song

Biting Your Tail by Iron & Wine