Stories, healing and collective trauma

In these gorgeous extracts from poets Marie Howe and Pádraig Ó Tuama, as Anna Molitor recounts while introducing them, you’ll find depth, insight and simplicity without being simpistic: 

The best poems are the poems that hold the unsayable, the irreducible. 
Something in the heart of the poem that we feel and intuit
and really cannot name.

Two poems below with the poets reading them live. These are from a great Collective Trauma Summit talk (see resources section> for details).

What the silence seemed to say

Do you still believe in borders now
Birds soar over your maps and walls
and always have.

You might have watched how
the smoke from your own fires
traveled on wind you couldn’t see.
Wafting over the valley and up and over
the hills and over the next valley
in the next hill.

Did you not hear
the animals howl and sing?
Or hear the silence of the animals
no longer singing?
Now you know
what it is, to be afraid.

Have you come to your senses
or will you meet this too
with your opinions and your arguments?
Or, perhaps it’s time for you to be quiet.

You think this is a dream?
It is not a dream.
You think this is a theoretical question?

What do you love more
than what you imagine
is your singular life?

Are you ready to give
up that idea too?
Your ideas about fairness and luck.

The water grows clearer.
The swans settle and float there.

Are you willing to take your place
in the forest again?
To become loam and bark,
to become what you call a pig,
to be a leaf falling from a great height,
to be the worm who eats the leaf
and the bird who eats the worm?

Look at the sky.
Are you willing to be the sky again?

You think this lesson is too hard for you.
You want the time out to end.
You want to go to the movies as before,
to sit and eat with your friends.

You can end now but not in the way you imagine.
You know the mind that has been talking to you
for so long the mind that can explain everything?

Don’t listen.
Find the passport you once held
and put away in some imaginary drawer.
Remember, you were once a citizen of the
country called I don’t know.
Remember the burning boat
that brought you there.

Climb in.

Watch Marie read it here> with an introduction by Pádraig
(note above is a transcript and our best approximation of lines and form)

A narrative of the creation of the world where some of the complexity is named

Make believe

And on the first day
god made
something up.
Then everything came along:

seconds, sex and
beasts and breaths and rabies;
hunger, healing,
lust and lust’s rejections;
swarming things that swarm
inside the dirt;
girth and grind
and grit and shit and all shit’s functions;
rings inside the tree trunk
and branches broken by the snow;
pigs’ hearts and stars,
mystery, suspense and stingrays;
insects, blood
and interests and death;
eventually, us,
with all our viruses, laments and curiosities;
all our songs and made-up stories;
and our songs about the stories we’ve forgotten;
and all that we’ve forgotten we’ve forgotten;

and to hold it all together god made time
and those rhyming seasons
that display decay.

Watch Pádraig read the poem here> following some context from Marie.

Links, posts, credits

These poems are extracts from the Collective Trauma Summit. See https://collectivetraumasummit.com/event-recordings/ for more.

More poetry on this site 🙂 

• Water: our first mother here>
• Behold: The sky is on fire here>
• A Deep but Dazzling Darkness here>
• Inversnaid here>
• The Summer Day. Audio here>
• sp/ns: simple please, not simplistic here>
• Think, are you thinking? here>
• Plan B: when I die here>
• Stuff me in a backpack: hike as far as you can here>
• Why I eat late here>

Photos by Festina Lentívaldi, (be) Benevolution. Reuse: Creative Commons BY-NC 3.0 US except for video screenshots.