Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.
The rites of passage to learn an emotion. Similar to the descriptions in the biblical verses of Ecclesiastes "there is a time for everything"....sometimes just thinking on these terms makes me feel so much better. And it is so funny that it does. So surface.
ReplyDeleteIf we know that we love snowboarding but despise snow and then move to hawaii where we miss snowboarding. Does that make us love or hate snow even more?
We know kindness and want to be more kind when someone else offsets that with anger? Or do we, too, become angry. It is our outlook that most determines our presence. I wish there was a will to always be present...
We discussed the idea of the "others" in a writing course after reading Waiting For the Barbarians (which is an incredible book and race and colonialism). One idea that stuck with me is that we define "us" by "them" or what we are not. This fits for this poem. We know kindness because it is not "desolate," dead, or "sorrow." Kindness is not causing pain or suffering.
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