Followers
Now is no time for silence
What to say? What to do? How can I speak more than half-hearted platitudes into the noise and the pain? What can I offer to help my black brothers and sisters — fellow humans, loved by God, who I have failed to seek and support? Should I be silent? What should I tell my children?
Many of us have asked ourselves questions such as these in recent weeks. The depths of injustice and racial prejudice have, perhaps for the first time in American history, been laid utterly bare. And at that bottom, in new light, we perceive old things for the first time. For those like me who have benefited all our lives from white privilege, we see ourselves. We see conscious and unconscious racism. We see fear. Old fear. Old apathy. Old indifference.
And yet, at the bottom we begin to understand. To see the subtlety and breadth of prejudice that runs through American culture and American hearts.
So what can I do? I can give what I have. I’m not a politician, a social worker or an activist. But I am a poet. And instead of being mute, I believe that those of us who are compelled to create have a responsibility to make something right now and to give it away. To speak a word into the chaos in the hope that it reaches an ear, touches a heart in need of comfort. It isn’t much, but it’s something and it’s a start. Instead of silence, now is the time to whistle in the dark. To make, and in so doing to help make a way through.
I wrote this poem earlier this spring, but I think it was meant for right now. For the four children who follow my example, I can warn them not to follow ancestral footsteps into the mines of injustice. I can teach them not to walk blindly into that shady glen’s sunken face. And my prayer is that each of us can find some way to turn that place of death into a green sanctuary, where the earth beneath our feet is made new, the old shafts are filled, and nothing hangs over our heads but, to borrow from Wendell Berry, a canopy of birdsong.
Followers
Lamplight still shines
in what I must take for a mind: I see
how it limns round corridors, glints
on mineral motes, reaches
into void that will cave
after charges, wrongly placed,
disorder backbreaking work –
untold days, shoulder by cheek, shafts
hand-smooth and coal-dark, blades
full, guzzling, grinding as we forced
our way into that cool mountainous heart.
Prophets we were not,
could not predict the hundred-ton river
of dry-stack shale held
between beds of granite, ponderous,
waiting
to fall, crush
the air and all else from us, spirits
expressed in earth’s mighty exhale –
and only now do I remember
the ring of canaries, only now
do I see that headlong rush to stoke
the coals of avarice was flight
from ourselves, all order, all reason, unable
now to warn the young ones who charge
heedless toward our catacomb, ready
to that shady glen’s sunken face,
eyes feverish, gleaming
like diamonds we could never reach.
