Poetry for When the World Burns
Poetry saved my life. I’ve heard many poets, including myself, utter some version of this sentiment over the years. Usually, this response is given after an interviewer asks a question like, “What is saving your life right now?” or “What is sustaining you these days?” The fact that questions such as these have become par for the course is, I believe, telling us something about the times we are living in. You do not have to tell most of us that the world is on fire. Even if we disagree on the ignition points, we can smell the smoke in the air, and many of us are trying to figure out how to keep the smoke from filling our lungs. We reach for practices to help us breathe. We look for guides who will help us navigate through the haze.
Poetry has been that practice for me, and poets have been my guides. Lucille Clifton said, “Poetry and art are not about answers to me; they are about questions.”1 The sense of impending doom that many of us are feeling is due, at least in part, to the fact that many of the answers we’ve been given about life and how the world works have come up empty. While there are voices trying to offer new answers, I have found that my soul longs for a place to bring my honest questions and wrestlings: a place comfortable with mystery and uncertainty, a spacious place. Poetry has given me permission to fall into Mystery and embrace what is unanswerable, because poetry has a way of welcoming tension without the need to resolve it.
As I engage with the practice of poetry, both reading it and writing it, my capacity to stand in the both/and of life has increased. In a world that seems to be falling apart all around us, I believe the ability to accept and embrace the seeming contradictions of our world—life and death, beauty and brutality—is essential to our flourishing and evolution as human beings. A poem contains multitudes in one word, one line, one stanza, and so do we. So does life. For some of us, our instinct is to fixate on what is wrong. We view the world through a critical gaze and miss its splendor. Others of us, like myself, do all we can to block out the horrid and focus on what we consider pleasant. Both are paths that invariably lead us further away from our own humanity. Poetry has been a salve for me because it reminds me that we need all of it and that there is space for all of it. When I forget beauty, poetry is there to invite me to slow down and notice the small blossoms of God’s new creation breaking through. When I become numb to heartache, poetry brings me back in touch with the tears of the world.
The world is on fire.
As it always is.
The world is still beautiful.
As it always is.
Drew Jackson is a poet, speaker, and public theologian. He is author of God Speaks Through Wombs: Poems on God’s Unexpected Coming and Touch the Earth: Poems on The Way. Drew currently serves as Director of Mission Integration for the CAC, and lives in Brooklyn, New York with his wife and daughters. You can find him on Instagram @d.jacksonpoetics.