Inauguration Day ( short reply to Jorie Graham)

The wall is unbreakable

I am that I am

This is the presence

An unbreakable sorrow

Something the wall gazers

Come to understand

Only when Nothingness

Supplants our yearning

It fills us with hope not despair

*  *  *  *  *

Backstory:  This short poem may be better appreciated with its backstory.  Today is Inauguration Day – a day many of us have been dreading, with an alternating sense of resignation and despair.  The indefatigable Kaveh Akbar (@KavehAkbar) made one of his fine poetic postings to Twitter – a lovely poem by Jorie Graham called Little Exercise.  It seems uncannily apt to the present moment.  The poem begins this way:

The screen is full of voices, all of them holding their tongues.
Certain things have to be “undergone,” yes.
To come to a greater state of consciousness, yes.

This is a powerful poem about our collapsing world order.  It’s not just a political or social collapse, as Graham goes on to acknowledge, the soil being so overfed it cannot hold a root system in place.  This feels like a crisis of Biblical proportion.  And so the poem ends hauntingly:

  

Are we “Beyond salvation”?  Will you not speak?
Such a large absence – shall I not compel the largest presence?
Can we not break the wall?

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Our yearning for immanence has never been stronger.  But we must surmount it.  The wall itself cannot be broken or surmounted.  Staring at the wall long enough -- in the manner of Bodhidharma, who after all stared for 9 (not just 8) long years -- we begin to develop an awareness of nothing, and in that awareness we find a true alternative to all our yearnings, which comes to fill us with hope and compassion, not despair.