Hope: Invisible before Us and Still Possible

Christina Taylor Green

Christina Taylor Green

At the end of yesterday’s memorial service remembering those who died in the tragic Tucson shooting, the president of the University of Arizona read a poem by W. S. Merwin, recently named our poet laureate. I found a copy of it on the University’s Poetry Center website, along with the following wonderful quotation by Merwin about the role of poetry in time of crisis:

Poetry addresses individuals in their most intimate, private, frightened and elated moments. People turn to poetry in times of crisis because it comes closer than any other art form to addressing what cannot be said. In expressing the inexpressible poetry remains close to the origins of language.

The poem itself is a wonderful description of a new year’s dawn bringing new hope. Note how delicate it is, qualifying our hopes (“our hopes such as they are”) as if it fears that a more forceful handling of them will crush them or rob them of their magic. For me, Merwin’s poem beautifully complements President Obama’s call to us, and call to himself, to be worthy of the idealistic hopes of Christina Green, the nine-year-old who was killed:

I believe we can be better. Those who died here, those who saved lives here – they help me believe. We may not be able to stop all evil in the world, but I know that how we treat one another is entirely up to us. I believe that for all our imperfections, we are full of decency and goodness, and that the forces that divide us are not as strong as those that unite us.

That’s what I believe, in part because that’s what a child like Christina Taylor Green believed. Imagine: here was a young girl who was just becoming aware of our democracy; just beginning to understand the obligations of citizenship; just starting to glimpse the fact that someday she too might play a part in shaping her nation’s future. She had been elected to her student council; she saw public service as something exciting, something hopeful. She was off to meet her congresswoman, someone she was sure was good and important and might be a role model. She saw all this through the eyes of a child, undimmed by the cynicism or vitriol that we adults all too often just take for granted.

I want us to live up to her expectations. I want our democracy to be as good as she imagined it. All of us – we should do everything we can to make sure this country lives up to our children’s expectations.

Here’s the poem:

To the New Year

By W. S. Merwin

With what stillness at last
you appear in the valley
your first sunlight reaching down
to touch the tips of a few
high leaves that do not stir
as though they had not noticed
and did not know you at all
then the voice of a dove calls
from far away in itself
to the hush of the morning

so this is the sound of you
here and now whether or not
anyone hears it this is
where we have come with our age
our knowledge such as it is
and our hopes such as they are
invisible before us
untouched and still possible

from Present Company

I remember thinking, not long after my son Justin died, that whether his death proved to be a curse that blighted or a blessing that healed was up to those of us who loved him.  The event didn’t determine the future; our response to it did.  I pray that our country will use this tragedy to see and to touch hopes that have been invisible but that are still possible.  Although we are in a valley, may our hopes touch us as the first sunlight touches the tips of a few high leaves.  The voice of the dove calls to us in the hush of the new morning.

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