A Ritual to Read to Each Other by William Stafford
A Ritual to Read to Each Other
by William E. Stafford
If you don't know the kind of person I am
and I don't know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.
For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dike.
And as elephants parade holding each elephant's tail,
but if one wanders the circus won't find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.
And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider—
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.
For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give — yes or no, or maybe —
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.
I suppose I’m on a Stafford roll this morning, but they sort of go together. I find this a gorgeous poem to open groups with. A Ritual to Read to Each Other is the second poem in Traveling Through the Dark (1962), the volume that won Stafford the National Book Award in 1963. As I said with his “Yes” poem, William Stafford (1914–1993) in addition to just being a gorgeous poet, was a conscientious objector during World War II, served four years in alternative civilian service, taught at Lewis & Clark College for decades, and wrote a poem every morning of his adult life as a sustained discipline — over 22,000 poems across fifty years. This particular poem has had remarkable circulation in peace and conflict resolution circles, in organizational ethics training, in Quaker meetings (Stafford was raised in the Brethren tradition and shared sensibilities with the Quaker peace tradition), and in any community where speaking truthfully to one another is the foundational practice.
