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''' '' THANK GOD! :
TIMES '' '''
! GLOBAL FOUNDER FRAMERS ! : !WOW! : NEVERTHELESS - AS THE POETS remind us, too, suffering is not our only birthright. Life is also our birthright. Life and Love and beauty.
''When despair for the world'' is all we can feel, as Wendell Berry it in ''The Peace of Wild Things,'' the world itself - with its wood and its blue herons ''who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief '' maybe our greatest solace.
Let the globe, if nothing else, say this is true:
That even as we grieved, we grew,
That even as we hurt, we hoped,
That even as we tired, we tried.
The poets are forever telling us to look for this kind of peace, to stuff ourselves with sweetness, to fill ourselves up with loveliness. They remind us that ''there are, on this planet alone, something like two million naturally occurring sweet things, some with names so generous as to kick the steel from my knees,'' as Ross notes in ''Sorrow Is Not My Name.''
The World Students Society honors Ms. Gorman's poem - addressed to ''Americans, and the World'' was timeless. Ever so.
WE ARE A SPECIES IN LOVE WITH BEAUTY. In springtime you drive down any rural road - likely in most parts of the world - and you will find rows of daffodils blooming next to the shabbiest homesteads and rustiest makings.
Often they are blooming next to no structure at all, ghostly circles around long-vanished mailboxes, a bright line denoting a fence row where the fence now stands.
The daffodils tell us that though we might be poor, we are never too poor for beauty, to find a way to name it while we are still alive to call the gorgeous world by its many generous names.
For isn't our own impermanence the undisputed truth that lurks beneath all our fears and all our sorrows and even all our pleasures:
''Life is short, though I keep this from my children,'' writes Maggie Smith in ''Good Bones.'' ''Life is short, and I've shortened mine in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways.''
Carpe diem is the song that poet's have ever sung, and it is our song. ''I think this is / the prettiest world - so long as you don't mind / a little dying,'' Mary Oliver writes in the Kingfisher.
Many humans, probably the vast majority humans, feel they can get along just fine without poetry. But tragedy - a breakup, a cancer diagnosis, a sudden death - can change their minds about that, if only because the struggle to find words for something so huge and so devastating can be overwhelming.
''Again and again, this constant forsaking,'' Natasha Trethewey calls it her poem ''Myth''.
To name the forsaking wouldn't seem to help, but it does. It always helps.
I was 18 when I learned that lesson the hardest way such lessons can be learned : by burying someone I loved. For three years she was my beloved teacher, the kind of teacher who opens worlds but who could also somehow hear me saying much that I couldn't yet say.
''Margaret, are you grieving / Over Goldengrove unleaving?'' she would say, smiling, in autumn, quoting Hopkins when she found me along the dogwoods after school.
If she knew I lingered there in hopes of continuing our classroom conversation far from my classmates' ears, she never let on.
Though she must have been in a hurry to get home to her husband and her little boy, she just listened.
When she died so young, the summer after my graduation, I could not believe how the world went on. People were still honking their horns in traffic. People were still balancing their checkbooks, still owing their lawns, still hurrying to put super on the table.
Why hadn't it all screeched into silence? How could there be anything left to do in the world but grieve?
Then I remembered Auden's ''Musee des Beaux Arts,'' a poem she taught us late in her last year, - when her voice was already growing fainter, quivering until she swallowed again :
About suffering they were never wrong.
The Old-Masters : how will they understand.
In human position : how it takes place.
While someone else is eating or opening.
A window or just walking-dully along.
About suffering Auden was also not wrong, and through many seasons of grief in all the years since I was 18, I have remembered that poem.
We know how vulnerable we are. We understand that now that new terrors - and old terrors wearing new guises - will always rise up and come for us.
Thank Almighty God for the poets, here in the mildness of April and in the winter storms alike, who help us find the words our own tongues feel too swollen to speak.
Thank God for the poets who teach our blinkered eyes to see these gifts the world has given us, and what we owe it in return.
The Honor and Serving of the Latest Global Operational Research on Poets and Great Writings, continues. The World Students Society thanks author Margaret Renkl.
With respectful dedication to Global Founder Framers, Mankind, Leaders, Parents, Students, Professors and Teachers of the world. See Ya all prepare and register for Great Global Elections on The World Students Society : wssciw.blogspot.com and Twitter - !E-WOW! - The Ecosystem 2011 :
''' Suffering - Samples '''
Good Night and God Bless
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