Why it’s important to keep writing

Poem (I lived in the first century of world wars)

 

By Muriel Rukeyser

I lived in the first century of world wars.

Most mornings I would be more or less insane,

The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories,

The news would pour out of various devices

Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen.

I would call my friends on other devices;

They would be more or less mad for similar reasons.

Slowly I would get to pen and paper,

Make my poems for others unseen and unborn.

In the day I would be reminded of those men and women,

Brave, setting up signals across vast distances,

Considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.

As the lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened,

We would try to imagine them, try to find each other,

To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile

Waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other,

Ourselves with ourselves. We would try by any means

To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves,

To let go the means, to wake.

 

I lived in the first century of these wars.

 

Copyright Credit: Muriel Rukeyser, “Poem” from The Speed of Darkness. Copyright © 1968 by Muriel Rukeyser. Reprinted by permission of International Creative Management.

Source: The Speed of Darkness (Vintage Books, 1968)

 

I discovered this poem by Muriel Rukeyser this past week. I’d read her work before and was a bit, neh. Someone had recommended her to me at an AWP conference I surreptitiously attended. Her work felt like labor activist/early 20^th-century Romantic, enamored by Russian writers-kind of sensibility. A bit like the writings of Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker. Someone who starts out gung-ho to change the world and later decides that they’d like to change the world—if they could.

Anyway, the world does need changing. I’m not happy with the current state of affairs but I also don’t think things will go back to what they were, and we might just have to start over. Whatever that means. I hope to one day meet Dorothy Day and Muriel Rukeyser and have a conversation.

from Poetry Foundation