Poetry Report: Anniversary of Boston Marathon
“A poem could be written about a new mass shooting every week”
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To Run
~a prayer for Boston
To run
is to rise above the weak spirit
is to take on pain
is to push pain in the chest
with both palms
stumbling over garbage,
gravel, fragments of life,
is to say I will take you
on in the street.
Every breath of mine
is a battering ram,
shoving, crushing,
swinging a hammer of air.
I am a body of fast moving blood
inhaling you
taking you in like a tank.
I will consume your hate.
I will run straight into you
as if you were a finish line of joy,
picking up the fallen along the way
and you will never stop me,
you will never
stop me.
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On April 15, 2013 the Boston Marathon was bombed. Before the bombers had been identified or caught, I wrote a poem on an iPod in a Starbucks so I could post it with their free Wi-Fi. I was furious after just hearing the story reported on NPR. As a lifelong runner, I couldn’t be silent. I posted the poem to Facebook on April 16th and asked my friends to share it if they felt moved to do so.
What happened next still surprises me. By the time I had walked into work, 30 minutes later, the poem had been shared already a hundred times. By noon, it was in the thousands and poet friends from around the country were contacting me, writing that they had gotten the link to the poem more than once from several different sources. When I got home that night, I had a message on Facebook from WBUR in Boston from Robin Young of NPR’s Here and Now program asking if I could call them right away. The next morning I read the poem over the phone from my kitchen table and it went out over the airwaves to a still grieving Boston. Robin Young cried. Later that day, the entire country heard the poem on NPR. I had been writing and performing poetry for 23 years and that was the first time I truly experienced what could happen if a poem captured a moment in time and crystalized what people were feeling.
It was then that I decided I wanted to write a weekly poem about the news. I was fortunate that Carrie Seitzinger of NAILED thought it was a worthy experiment. Over the last year, I’ve learned exactly how much I previously avoided the world of current events in my poems. Having to face up to real events has taught me the responsibility of truth in poetry is never more apparent than when you are writing about the news. Here is a list of some lessons I learned.
A Few Things I Learned While Writing Poetry About the News:
1. A poem could be written about a new mass shooting every week.
2. Airplane crashes have more longevity than other news stories.
3. Poor workers die in a building collapse, every month.
4. Wars not involving the U.S. make for the least read poems.
5. Natural disasters bring people together. Mass shootings do too, but not as much.
6. Several idiots trying to fix your car with matches and a can of gasoline while you tell them it’s not broken is the best metaphor for
the U.S. Congress.
7. Great poems come from the passing of a great life.
8. Kenya’s greatest poet, survived prison only to be killed at a Mall.
9. A poem can be written about a war torn neighborhood while you look at the Google satellite image of that neighborhood. It
appears absolutely normal and is absolutely haunting.
10. Writing poems about photographs of the news is easier than writing about the news.
11. Poems about the news are better when they’re not written directly about the news.
12. You have a greater respect for life when you write poems about the news, than when you write poems about life in general.
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