Hope - Week 3 - Hope-etry - Taking the Shoes off Your Voice
Ok - I gotta say, I love the title - one thing that I came up with and one quoting from Krista Tippett’s conversation with Ocean Vuong.
The latter part (Taking the Shoes off Your Voice) comes from writer and poet Ocean Vuong. In theirconversation he shares about how, in his culture, taking shoes off when entering a home is a sign of respect and honor for the place where you are going to be present. He suggests that thinking of doing the same with our voices and our words. What I understood him to mean by that is that our language is important. In the conversation, he shares about the ways that people so often use violent language to express pleasure, for example. He shares, “I heard boys talk about pleasure as conquest. ‘I bagged her. She’s in the bag. I owned it. I owned that place. I knocked it out of the park. I went in there, guns blazing. Go knock ‘em dead. Drop dead gorgeous. Slay — I slayed them. I slew them.’”
Krista followed that up by saying:
...we are so fluent in the sensibility and imagination and atmosphere of violence with our words. So part of the work of making hope more reasonable and more possible is going to be putting more vivid, intentional language out there to illustrate its reality and its possibilities...
I wrote about something of this in my book, Ordinary Benchmarks, specifically around the language of photography and how so much of it is tied to what can be heard as violent language. Here’s a PDF of that section if you’d like to read it. It speaks to how we can use much more beautiful, careful, and loving language with the art of photography.
Since listening to this conversation between Ocean and Krista, my heart went to poetry and how poetry requires such deliberate language. So much of poetry is not about how many words are written but about the specific words that are used and the ways they are used. I haven’t spent a lot of time writing poetry but I have grown a much deeper appreciation for it, especially rooted in the ways that the Psalms have changed my life. So, over the last few days I wrote to several friends and family members and asked if they would share poems around hope that have spoken to them. This week, I’m going to share those poems along with (of course) some photos that connected to those poems. I was originally going to start with an Emily Dickinson poem shared by one of my daughters but then another poem was shared that is very much a response to it. Both poems are wonderful and both are shared below.
But before getting to the poems, I want to share why the second poem was so needed. I am not going to get into the details of it here, but one of my family members had something really awful said to them yesterday which followed another really awful thing said to them a few days before. It was so disheartening to hear this and to see the ways that these painful, hurtful words affected them. The words were far from ones that Ocean Vuong would describe as having “taken shoes off their voice.” Instead, they were hurtful and cruel.
So, like I shared above, I was going to originally share this poem by Emily Dickinson by itself. It is called “Hope” Is the Thing with Feathers.
“Hope” is the Thing with Feathers - Emily Dickinson
“Hope” is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all -And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard -
And sore must be the storm -
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm -I’ve heard it in the chillest land -
And on the strangest Sea -
Yet - never - in Extremity,
It asked a crumb - of me.1
It is a beautiful poem and definitely speaks to what hope can be and the beauty that hope can inspire and reflect of the world. When I think of a visual for this poem, I think of a beautiful bird in early morning light singing its morning song welcoming the new day. On a different day, I can think of a bunch of photos from the past and I am sure I could see something of this on most morning walks I have with Scout.
But with what I shared above of the things said the last few days, another poem that was shared I think is also appropriate. It is called Hope is a Sewer Rat by Caitlin Seida. Here it is (language warning)...
Hope is a Sewer Rat - Caitlin Seida
Hope is not the thing with feathers
That comes home to roost
When you need it most.Hope is an ugly thing
With teeth and claws and
Patchy fur that’s seen some shit.It’s what thrives in the discards
And survives in the ugliest parts of our world,
Able to find a way to go on
When nothing else can even find a way in.
It’s the gritty, nasty little carrier of such
diseases as
optimism, persistence,
Perseverance and joy,
Transmissible as it drags its tail across
your path
and
bites you in the ass.Hope is not some delicate, beautiful bird,
Emily.
It’s a lowly little sewer rat
That snorts pesticides like they were
Lines of coke and still
Shows up on time to work the next day
Looking no worse for wear.2
I absolutely loved this poem when it was shared and I appreciate it even more today. I love that I could add in a few lines about what was said to my family member and how we can continue to speak hope even in the face of cruelty and meanness. The lines about hope, the sewer rat, being the carrier of diseases such as optimisim, persistence, perseverance, and joy really speak to me today. I love the sense that hope is bedraggled, messy, and just keeps coming no matter what the world throws at it. It isn’t just a “la la la” type of thing but something that is tough, can take the punches that the world throws, and keeps going. I think of Steve Rogers in the Captain America movies when he is getting beaten up in the alley way and keeps getting up saying, “I could do this all day” and then a bunch of movies later when he stands before the assembled armies seemingly alone and implies the same (along with a bunch of other moments). That’s this hope.
So, the photo is this - seen on my walk this morning with Scout at the Cincinnati Nature Center. My sister and I have a shared photo album where we share photos of hearts that we see around us and this was shared for her earlier today.
That leaf has seen better days. It fell from a tree at some point and now is ground into the muddy path, it has felt the soles of many shoes stepping on it, It has holes in it, it is broken in places, and yet...the heart shape is still there. And yet, the green continues to show. And yet, it stands out against the drab brown of the cracked and muddy ground. That leaf is like the sewer rat of hope. It is beautiful and powerful.
Over the next week, I’ll share some other poems that friends have shared but I would love to hear others that have spoken to you of hope. Feel free to share them in the comments or direct message me with them. Let’s share some Hope-etry...goodness knows we need it.
Here are a few other photos from our walk this morning:
Grace, Peace, Love, Hope, and Joy,
Ed
PS - Scout looking majestic as well...
So very intriguing. Shared an apartment with an English major between undergrad and grad school. She ended up doing her Master’s thesis on Emily. Loved the contrast in the two poems. Both are true, depending on the situation, I think.