Some People Can Really Say It For Us

 Laure-Anne Bosselaar

It seems like so much is going on.  Some is personal, so much has a national and an international impact.  Some is good, some is not.  So many lives impacted.  Some hurting. Some rejoicing.  Some afraid,  Some hopeful. Some just living on.  That's why I love this poem.  It reminds me that Heaven knows about it all, too.  Laure-Anne Bosselaar is a very talented contemporary poet, don't you think?  Try to read it through to the end.  I think you'll like it.




The Worlds in this World

Doors were left open in heaven again: 

drafts wheeze, clouds wrap their ripped pages 

around roofs and trees. Like wet flags, shutters 

flap and fold. Even light is blown out of town,

its last angles caught in sopped

newspaper wings and billowing plastic — 

all this in one American street. 

Elsewhere, somewhere, a tide 

recedes, incense is lit, an infant 

sucks from a nipple, a grenade

shrieks, a man buys his first cane. 

Think of it: the worlds in this world. 

Yesterday, while a Chinese woman took 

hours to sew seven silk stitches into a tapestry 

started generations ago, guards took only

seconds to mop up a cannibal’s brain from the floor 

of a Wisconsin jail, while the man who bashed 

the killer’s head found no place to hide, 

and sat sobbing for his mother in a shower stall —

the worlds in this world. 

Or say, one year — say 1916: 

while my grandfather, a prisoner of war 

in Holland, sewed perfect, eighteen-buttoned 

booties for his wife with the skin of a dead 

dog found in a trench; shrapnel slit 

Apollinaire's skull, Jesuits brandished 

crucifixes in Ouagadougou, and the Parthenon 

was already in ruins. 

That year, thousands and thousands of Jews 

from the Holocaust were already — were 

still — busy living their lives; 

while gnawed by self-doubt, Rilke couldn’t 

write a line for weeks in Vienna’s Victorgasse, 

and fishermen drowned off Finnish coasts, 

and lovers kissed for the very first time,

while in Kashmir an old woman fell asleep, 

her cheek on her good husband's belly. 

And all along that year the winds 

kept blowing as they do today, above oceans 

and steeples, and this one speck of dust 

was lifted from somewhere to land exactly 

here, on my desk, and will lift again — into 

the worlds in this world.

Say now, at this instant: 

one thornless rose opens in a blue jar above 

that speck, but you — reading this — know 

nothing of how it came to flower here, and I 

nothing of who bred it, or where, nothing 

of my son and daughter’s fate, of what grows 

in your garden or behind the walls of your chest: 

is it longing? Fear? Will it matter?

Listen to that wind, listen to it ranting

The doors of heaven never close,

that’s the Curse, that’s the Miracle.

 by Laure-Anne Bosselaar