[I plan to post here every Friday, as time and energy allow. Donations and free subscriptions are equally welcome. All subscribers will always have access to everything I post.]
Tossed and turned in an ocean of weaponized words, it’s hard to stay in touch with our own north star, our sense of meaning and purpose, of who and whose we are. Some of us invite this madness by doomscrolling and cursing the fates, as I do more often than I like to admit. But most of it is imposed on us by a political movement whose publicly stated strategy is to “Flood the zone with s_ _t.” That’s Tyranny for Dummies, Chapter One: a population drowning in insults, lies, threats and assorted insanities is easy to subdue.
It’s sacrilege when the gift of language is used to shut down hearts and minds rather than open them up, which is why I so deeply value life-giving prose and have tried to write some of it over the past sixty years. But for a long time, poetry—reading and writing it—has been my first line of defense against assaults on my soul. Poetry, a way of using words where less is more. Poetry, a way to explore what it means to be human in darkness and light.
And yet, for a long time, “imposter syndrome” kept me from publishing my poems. What if Emily Dickinson or Gerard Manley Hopkins returned to show me the door? Then a friend shared a remark made by the great Willam Stafford. Asked how he managed to write at least one poem every day, Stafford responded—doubtless with a grin—“I just lower my standards.” Though he may not have intended it, Stafford’s words liberated me to go public with some of my poems, as I’m doing here with two of them. Now that’s poetic license!
As the liberation of my poet-self went on, I had the good fortune to meet Carrie Newcomer—one of our finest singer-songwriters, a self-taught virtuoso with words and music—and we began a collaboration called The Growing Edge. Working with Carrie encouraged me to share my poems more freely, and from time to time she generously set some of my words to music. Thanks to YouTube (see below), you can listen as she and her gifted musical friends lift the language of one of my poems off the page and loose them from “the surly bonds of earth!”
The poems I’m posting today come from a conversation I’ve been having with myself ever since I looked in the mirror and saw an old man: “What does my life add up to, if anything? Where is it taking me? And what comes next as I draw closer to ‘that cottage of darkness,’ as Mary Oliver called it?” These are among the questions I’m living as I try to keep my eye on my north star.
“Everything Falls Away” began when I woke up one morning with those three words insisting on my attention and refusing to go away. I tracked them for a few weeks, and eventually arrived at the poem below, a reminder that community is our destiny. “The Music Will Play On” came from my occasional musings on death, and from my fascination with what the ancients called “the music of the spheres.” For me, it’s a celebration of the joy to be found in the hidden heart of things.
Some might ask, “At a time of national crisis, what does all of this have to do with saving our democracy from descending into tyranny?” My answer is, “Everything.” Exploring ancient questions about life and death can help us realize that we have more in common than that which divides us—and our shared humanity is what we must rescue from the current reign of cruelty, corruption, ignorance and incompetence. Remembering and revering the sacredness of our lives is an act of resistance against the unholy disorder this regime is trying to impose on us, and it gives us compelling reason to move from reflective words to political action.
If anything here speaks to you, I invite you to sit with it for a while in silence—that ever-available safe harbor where we can return to ourselves and each other, then rejoin the effort to calm the angry sea.
[NOTES: Carrie Newcomer’s work is HERE and HERE. The Great Wave off Kanagawa is HERE. The epigraph to “Everything Falls Away” is HERE. The Center for Courage & Renewal is HERE. My 10 books are HERE and HERE.]
Thank you Parker for this powerful and insightful post. I am grateful for your poetry and your dedication to lifting up what is deep, decent and true in the human experience. “Everything falls away except the thread, you’ve unknowingly followed all along.” You have helped so many (including myself) to trust our inner teacher, honor the soul’s deep imperative, and follow the call of something true - even if that shining thread was only clear in retrospect. I love this poem and this post. Amen Parker!
These are wonderful poems. I too resonate with the idea of "lowering standards". I am VERY new to admitting and allowing my own poetry. They come to me when they come and when I write them I just publish "somewhere" as a kind of accountability mechanism so that I don't just sit on them. There's a chance one person somewhere finds it a helpful framing for their own circumstances and truthfully, even if that's only me, that's ok.