Charming Snakes

So often when I come to this blog, I don’t really know what it is I want to write about.  I’ll have a certain idea, or I’ll have been touched by an experience, but the subject I want to express does not easily translate to words.  This is why, sometimes, that I procrastinate on posting here.  This kind of writing is not like exploring characters and events in my novels.  This writing is exploring myself, and it’s so much harder.

Take today, for example.  I spent some time this morning transcribing a poem I’d found into one of my journals, a poem written in honor of Rachel Corrie.  Rachel was an American college student who went to Israel in 2003 on a peace mission.  She stood in front of an Israeli bulldozer to keep it from destroying a Palestinian home.  The bulldozer crushed her to death.  The poem I read, written three years later, spoke of everything Rachel had lost in the name of peace—the dreams she had dreamed in the middle of class, the family she might have had—because she wanted to stop the destruction that would “snatch a child from his laughter.”

Rachel and the poem have lingered in my mind all day.  I knew I wanted them to be the subject of my post this evening, but what did I want to say?  Did I want to call out all those who did not act as she did in the name of peace, or did I simply wish to honor Rachel’s courage and mourn her sacrifice?  What could I say to make the tragedy better?  Words are sadly lacking when it comes to this.

Did I want to express my own shame that I never knew about this?  But at the time it happened, I was busy drawing my own doodles in a middle schooler’s notebook, dreaming my own dreams.  Does the normality of American daily life, so all-consuming to our minds, excuse us from our ignorance about the world in general?  Daily life for our fellow man often includes destruction, war, blood, grief, hunger, thirst, and so many other forms of pain with which we in our comfortable homes are unfamiliar.  It’s not that we close our hearts to their suffering—it’s worse.  We close our eyes, pretending that the anguish doesn’t even exist, and never let them touch our hearts in the first place.

Maybe I didn’t want to get quite so deep.  Maybe I wanted, not to close my eyes, but to narrow my gaze.  The poem, then?  Did I want to simply admire the beauty of Fatima Naoot’s words, the concept of snatching a child from laughter, or the secondary, ghostly world of possibility she built around this girl who gave it up before she found it?  Did I want to speak of my jealousy that I can’t write with that level of clarity?  In the end, that’s all I’ve done.  My poetry, my translations from thought to word, are so much weaker.  So much that I can only speak of them in abstract.  I cannot always bring my thoughts to the surface.  They must remain shadows under the water that is my work, influencing what the reader sees but never really coming to light.  Meanwhile a true poet, a true artist, can take the beast by the throat, draw it up out of the water, and show it to others for what it is.  “This is Pain,” they can say, and the readers can look on it in all its ugliness, but without fear, for a poem makes the monsters we see in the darkness of ourselves less horrifying. 

Someday, I hope to be one of those monster-tamers, a snake-charmer, a wrangler of words.  For now, however, I’m just a fisherman, struggling with tangled metaphors and no bait.