I Want Poets ///

When another’s world, another’s life, another’s tether to all that is is frayed and on fire, I want a poet to tell me what it feels like

to bring me into the pain and the valor, the intensity and exhaustion, to make me wish I didn’t have the heart to know but grateful I have the heart to understand.

When the bombs and the screams and the salty waters of Pearl Harbor collided in chaos and virginities lost and futures being written at an unseen angle

When a parent’s child is sacrificed to the hysteria of life’s unconscionable mysteries or bullets rip breaths out of bodies, peoples, eternities in (not so) far off lands

When all loses its threads of connection and hatred dials up starvation of another if only because it’s an other

I want poets to tap the jugular of wine-red life force, to hold a blue flame to the rawest nerves, for they breathe like bodhisattvas when agony sears.

I want poets on the front line, so the records show the truth of humanity’s addled heartbeat, so my pulse will quicken until it explodes.

Only then, with the truth gnawed into our veins, the veins we deny we even share, will I and we and you know what we’ve done, who we’ve become and how far we’ve run.

by Adam Williams (Sept. 2018)


Photo by Brunel Johnson on Unsplash

Humanitou