The burden of having to explain yourself

Nov 01, 2019

Once upon a time there was such a thing as Poetry Friday here. These days I promise nothing, but as it happens to be a Friday, here is poem. I subscribe to the Poetry Foundation daily email, and this one came in this week. I like it. As one of the, apparently, most intuitive temperaments, I believe I can understand a lot of things that are never said. Yet at the same time, maybe as I get older, or after a long and wearying exposure to wordless messages, I appreciate more and more those with the courage and strength to actually communicate, with a little grace, what it is they mean or want or feel too. But I still like this poem.

HOW WONDERFUL
by Irving Feldman

How wonderful to be understood,
to just sit here while some kind person
relieves you of the awful burden
of having to explain yourself, of having
to find other words to say what you meant,
or what you think you thought you meant,
and of the worse burden of finding no words,
of being struck dumb . . . because some bright person
has found just the right words for you—and you
have only to sit here and be grateful
for words so quiet so discerning they seem
not words but literate light, in which
your merely lucid blossoming grows lustrous.
How wonderful that is!

And how altogether wonderful it is
not to be understood, not at all, to, well,
just sit here while someone not unkindly
is saying those impossibly wrong things,
or quite possibly they’re the right things
if you are, which you’re not, that someone
—a difference, finally, so indifferent
it would be conceit not to let it pass,
unkindness, really, to spoil someone’s fun.
And so you don’t mind, you welcome the umbrage
of those high murmurings over your head,
having found, after all, you are grateful
—and you understand this, how wonderful!—
that you’ve been led to be quietly yourself,
like a root growing wise in darkness
under the light litter, the falling words.

something this foggy day

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