Poetry: A Healing Tool for Dark Days

I started this month with mental health for writers, and I want to end it with a more personal look at the same topic.

One of the many reasons I’ve been grateful to Open Book for offering me this residency is feeling a sense of connection to my birth country at a time when I can’t physically return. This separation from family, especially frail, elderly parents, is a constant, gnawing source of grief.  Poetry – both reading and writing it – is one of the tools I use to help control the anxiety.

Prose can make us laugh, draw us in, let us escape – but we have to settle into a novel before it can do that. You can give a short poem a try even when your mind is swirling. Poetry is as varied and naunced as our moods; different genres, different poets, answer different needs. These are some of mine:

 Straight to the heart: In the dark year after I broke my neck and started realizing life might never be the same again, Emily Dickinson was a savior.  Once I was strong enough I started writing out and memorizing verses that said all I couldn’t, like the lines from After great pain a formal feeling comes:

 “This is the hour of lead –
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons recollect the snow –
First – Chill – then stupor –
then the letting go.”

 Comfort verse: I know Robert Frost would disapprove of my own free verse, but his poems, learned in childhood, soothe and bring me comfort. “Whose woods these are I think I know,”  – and I am on my horse in our farm in the Annapolis Valley, where I spent my teen years. The verses soothe like a lullaby.

 Reading aloud and the joy of rhythm: I find reading poetry aloud a form of meditation, as if my heartbeat steadies itself with the rhythm of the words. Lately I’ve been picking up my fat treasury of English poetry, shamefully unopened for far too long, and reading from whatever page it falls open on. If it’s new to me, I have to concentrate; if it’s familiar, there’s a certain pleasure in remembering lines I nearly know by heart, whether The Cremation of Sam McGee or The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner. It’s made me realize it’s surely time to take up that resolution of memorizing  more – a verse or two, an achievable accomplishment that is a reward in itself.

 Exploring new verse: There are many, many, brilliant poets writing now – some of them on this very site. Poetry is underpublished and it’s not always easy to find collections, especially when we’re not browsing in local bookstores. I subscribe to https://poets.org/poems and get a poem in my inbox every day – poetry that I would have never heard otherwise. I read them aloud and then go to the recording to hear the poets reading the lines themselves. Partly because learning something new always improves my mood and partly because I love the unexpectedness of a poet’s take on the world of now.

“The color of my mother’s thumbs up emoji  
is unchanged either because she’s not estranged  
by such things or because she doesn’t know  
the shade of her thumb can be changed.”  From Muscular Fantasy, for October  by Terrance Hayes.  Hearing him read it aloud is a gift. 

Speaking of listening:  My friend Sean K Berry, who has a great mellow voice, reads a classic poem, with a short discussion on SKB in Focus: https://tinyurl.com/a3nwe8rx every Saturday. (Yes, I’m the friend he was discussing sonnets with.)

So reading poetry soothes and cheers – but writing verse sorts out what I’m feeling so I can begin to deal with it. One night, overwhelmed with the day’s bad news, I found the various strands starting to shape themselves into verse. I’ve found that a notebook by the bed leads to insomnia, but I was calmed by the mental sorting of the thoughts into lines and trusted I’d remember what I needed to in the morning. Instead of triggering the grief, writing it out and working on it the next day let me take a step back from the emotions. I then used it as a script for EFT tapping – tapping on acupressure points while I read it aloud. 

I’ve started using the practice with my ten minute free-writing in the morning. It’s not great poetry, just a great tool for healing. And now that I’m feeling relaxed from a day of thinking and writing about poetry, I’m feeling brave enough to show you what I mean.

Pray for us, she said ­–
my husband how-are-you-ing as he paid
not expecting this truth
of phone calls in the night,
of choking fear that never leaves –
a cousin,
a best friend’s mother –
a death for every day.

A migrant like me,
her home so far away
it might as well be
imaginary, or on the moon.
I know the fear of midnight calls,
placing phones out of reach for three a.m. checks
but loud enough to hear
if the worst call comes.

I can’t stop wondering –
trying not to,
trying to keep at bay
this wolf that howls at the edge of my mind –
will I ever see my parents again.

Though I don’t nightmare –
as this woman does –
their fighting for beds,
for breath,
for funeral pyres.

What could I say, my husband asks,
awkward at that word –
prayer –
so mocked by our peers,
though they might understand
a plea for ease in a world of despair,
poem-crafted in formal words
when our own fail us.

We talked and thought –
I think we prayed –
but her fear raged in me late at night,
for if I am the luckier sister,
I am still her sister,
this woman I have never met,
our fears are the same,
and I will take her a psalm
of flowers today.

Take care, everyone; stay strong, and may you find the words, read or written, that bring you healing when you need it.