Counting, this New Year’s Morning, What Powers Yet Remain to Me by Jane Hirshfield
Counting, this New Year’s Morning, What Powers Yet Remain to Me
by Jane Hirshfield
The world asks, as it asks daily:
And what can you make, can you do, to change my deep-broken, fractured?
I count, this first day of another year, what remains.
I have a mountain, a kitchen, two hands.
Can admire with two eyes the mountain,
actual, recalcitrant, shuffling its pebbles, sheltering foxes and beetles.
Can make black-eyed peas and collards.
Can make, from last year’s late-ripening persimmons, a pudding.
Can climb a stepladder, change the bulb in a track light.
For four years, I woke each day first to the mountain,
then to the question.
The feet of the new sufferings followed the feet of the old,
and still they surprised.
I brought salt, brought oil, to the question. Brought sweet tea,
brought postcards and stamps. For four years, each day, something.
Stone did not become apple. War did not become peace.
Yet joy still stays joy. Sequins stay sequins. Words still bespangle, bewilder.
Today, I woke without answer.
The day answers, unpockets a thought from a friend
don’t despair of this falling world, not yet
didn’t it give you the asking
I include poems where sometimes I stumble over a line and I find tears coming to my eyes. I love the idea of bringing offerings to the beautiful question being asked, the questions that have no easy answers, and that the living the way into the asking (very Rilke too) is part of the not despairing.
This is from her book Ledger, composed across the four years from 2016 to 2019, the four years Hirshfield references directly in this poem (for four years I woke each day first to the mountain, then to the question). The book is, in real sense, her response to that period — the years that included the first Trump administration, accelerating climate emergency, the rise of authoritarian movements globally, and the writer's own reckoning with what poetry can do when the world is deep-broken, fractured. (There’s also a supposition that the friend mentioned might be Jack Gilbert, whose wonderful poem A Brief for the Defense is one I quote regularly. Hirshfield and Gilbert were close intellectual companions for decades and it sounds like him.
The friend's claim is not that the world will be saved, but that the asking itself is what the world gave, and that the asking is reason for not yet despairing.)
