Early Morning Poetry

People Like Us

by Robert Bly

“There are more like us. All over the world

There are confused people, who can't remember

The name of their dog when they wake up, and people

Who love God but can't remember where

He was when they went to sleep. It's

All right. The world cleanses itself this way.

A wrong number occurs to you in the middle

Of the night, you dial it, it rings just in time

To save the house. And the second-story man

Gets the wrong address, where the insomniac lives,

And he's lonely, and they talk, and the thief

Goes back to college. Even in graduate school,

You wander into the wrong classroom,

And hear great poems lovingly spoken

By the wrong professor. And you find your soul,

And greatness has a defender, and even in death you're safe.

This morning, gray, raining, headed in the wrong direction from the spring of yesterday, the only thing can save us is poetry. It never fails, regardless of the season, to inspire. Besides, Robert Bly tells a great truth in his poem, since all poetry is about great truths simply spoken. This poem glides through the ways some superior hand moves us from event to event, and we blindly do what comes next without having made a decision to do anything at all.

Author, Ann Pachett, spoke about this in her keynote on Friday night with regard to her bookstore in Nashville, Parnassus Books. It had never entered her mind to open a bookstore. Then, two big-box bookstores in her neighborhood of Greenhills closed their doors. A cry went up and she added her voice to the rest. “We need a locally owned bookstore!” they said, “Someone should open an independent bookstore!” Finally, she had to ask herself, “Who?” and of course the answer was obvious. She resisted at first, having one or two other irons in the fire, but when she finally decided to do it, everything came together incredibly well. Now Parnassus Books is a haven in the desert, and she loves it—she told us about all the stories that walk in the door, all the authors who come to sign books, and how much this bookstore she never intended to own provides fodder for her writing life. Now she is the spokesperson for Independent Booksellers in the U.S.

Meaningful serendipity. The spice of life. How hard we fight it, dreaming that we are in control of our destiny. Life itself is the hand that guides, if only we will let it.

                                                           In the Spirit,

                                                                Jane