The world asks as it asks daily
And what can you make, can you do, to change my deep-broken, fractured?
~from Counting, New Years Day, What Powers Yet Remain to Me, by Jane Hirshfield
That’s quite a question, isn’t it?
Poet Jane Hirshfield asks it at the top of a new poem from her latest book, The Asking. As I walked with this poem last month, I found myself reflecting on big questions like this one, especially as I think about ways to respond to the living of these days.
Hirshfield’s poetry seems committed to bringing these questions to light. It’s unique among the poetry I’ve been reading in the ways she integrates the deeply personal with the fullness of our existence - history, art, the natural world, the cosmos even – and not just within our human selves.
And yet, she often brings those big questions right back to human size, so we can consider, can ask, what can we do?
For the past decade, I’ve struggled with the weight of the world’s failing, trying to hold inside the despair, anger, and fear that somethings threatens to overwhelm me. But at the same time, becoming one who is porous to joy and beauty, who is of an age to know that the wonders of life in the world are plenty but also fleeting. I want to soak them up, savor them, protect them from deep fractures.
Hirshfield’s poems, and this one in particular, have invited me to put those two halves of myself together, and to see the value in responding to all of it from the wholeness of my truest, human self.
Which invites me to ask another question, another big question...what does this look like in the practical world of my life in the year 2026? How do I carry this intention into the living of every one of my days?
I take my cue from Hirshfield, and what she names as the “powers yet remaining to her.”
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 years late-ripening persimmons, a pudding
Can climb a stepladder, change the bulb in a track light.
Look how she roots her power in the stuff of everyday life. The mountain outside her window. The kitchen where she makes food. Two hands she can turn toward making a home. Or a poem.
These are the things I can do, too - things I already do every day. On a morning walk, feasting my eyes on the beauty of nature, relishing the sun’s radiance on my face, feeling my heart swell with love for the little dog prancing beside me, sharing a meal with people I love. This is how I ground myself in goodness, beauty, hope – because to do these things is to believe in life and all its wonderous unknowing.
Still, like me, Hirshfield doubts. She wants, needs to do more. Every day for years she wakes to the mountain, wakes to the question, and still the feet of the new sufferings follow in the feet of the old.
Again, she offers the basic elements of her life to the world’s altar.
I brought salt, brought oil to the question. Brought sweet tea.
Brought postcards and stamps. For years, each day, something.
I think of my own miles walked in all kinds of weather. Gallons of coffee consumed and sweet breads baked. Letters written, phone calls made, placards carried. Despite these efforts, there were no miracles.
Stone did not become apple. War did not become peace.
Each day, for years now, a bowl of coffee cupped between my two hands I steel my heart against news of the day’s fresh disaster.
But wait. There are, despite it all, graces to notice and name.
Yet still joy stays joy. Sequins stay sequins. Words still bespangle
bewilder.
Yes. I rejoice in hearing my grandson playing the piano, a song he has composed, a song so deeply of his soul that tears fall from my eyes. New diamonds in my anniversary ring will sparkle in the sunlight coming through the windshield. Poems and books can move me deeper into thought, into ideas, into hope.
Into questions that bespangle and bewilder, that may feel as if they have no answer. And yet…Hirshfield assures me they do.
The day answers, unpockets a thought as though from a friend –
Don’t give up on this falling world, not yet. didn’t it give you the asking
It won’t surprise you that I chose this poem to memorize, that I take it on my walk with me every morning. In saying it aloud as I move through my neighborhood I feel a pensive, but positive, energy rising from the ground beneath my feet. If I trust myself, if I continue to put one foot in front of the other with the small, sustainable actions that feel right to me – this is what I am meant to do as part of the collective who aim to change the deep-broken, fractured.
Every day offers each of us an opportunity to wake up and ask the question – and to answer it from the fullness of our humanity.
Don’t give up on this falling world, not yet.
We still have The Asking.