Does it happen that sometimes, when you are reading a collection of poems, a newspaper article, perhaps, or even a book of fiction, suddenly, some words on the page jump out, beckon you closer, and then rise as intimate whispers for you and only you? Do you feel like this? Like the chosen one, like somebody is speaking directly to you, enclosing you in a conspiratorial embrace, speaking with empathy, and the wisdom of distance or detachment. As if that piece of writing has come to you just then by some lucky cosmic mistake, and now it is your duty to listen, and pay heed.
I was reading William Stafford today, and this happened with one of the poems - ‘For My Young Friends Who Are Afraid’. Yes, I can almost hear you smiling at the other end. William Stafford, like Mary Oliver, Wislawa Szymborzka or Naomi Shihab Nye (and she considers Stafford a mentor and a great influence in her own writing), is a ‘soul poet’. He has this remarkable ability to open up the self, turning words into pliers, into fingers of light that reach into the darkness, and find a place there. He speaks with with patience and quiet fire, and before you know it you are caught in the lasso of his simple words.
Fear. Many of us are fearful of fear itself. This is known. The idea of the “Fear of the Unkown” is related to this. We do not know the contours of this thing, but we feel it, the way darkness enters our skin thorugh the tingling at the end of our toes and fingers. We fear it, because we do not understand it and it is out of our control. That fear turns into aggression sometimes, into a receding back, or a quietening. But it lingers like the smell of food gone stale, and it reminds us of its presence. It is anxiety or nervousness, it is uncertainty and our discomfort with it, it is incomprehension and under-confidence, it is the feeling before a ‘first time’ or the final lap. I do not know if it lessens with age, because experience is a subtle teacher, but it definitely makes us do things differently, sometimes great things, sometimes things we regret.
Either way, reading Stafford’s poem made me feel a little more comforted, a little more heard, and a little more secure, as I understood that I was a part of the whole.
‘That’s the world and we all live there.’
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