Cornelius Eady's "Atomic Prayer"

Thoughts on the stolen world.

Atomic Prayer

If the bomb drops
And I’m riding the
Staten Island Ferry,
Give me time to spit in the water.
If the bomb drops
And I’m on top
Of the Empire State Building,
Give me time
To toss a penny
Off the observation deck.
If the bomb drops
And I’m approaching the subway,
Let me have a chance
To jump the turnstile.
If the bomb drops
And I’m walking down Fifth Avenue
Grant me a loose brick,
A fresh plate-glass window,
Grant us a moment
When there’ll be no need
To play it safe.
Give to us the pleasure
Of misdemeanors.
Let each of us do
What we’ve always
Dreamed of,
But were too polite
To act out.
Let us extract
Our brief revenge,
Spilling and ripping things
We’ve been taught
Not to handle.
If we’re to die before we sleep,
Grant us a moment to uncover
The secrets behind the door marked Restricted,
Authorize us to touch what was always held
just beyond our reach.
Give us a taste
Of the stolen world.

from The Gathering of My Name (Carnegie Mellon, 1991)

---

I remember reading this poem for the first time in a used bookstore somewhere in Massachusetts. I was leafing through Eady’s Hardheaded Weather — a collection of selected poems — and saw the final seventeen lines of this poem (beginning with “Let each of us do…”) printed on their own page. I read those lines first, then the preceding ones, then the whole poem again, enamored by the tender irreverence of it.

This poem was first published in Eady’s The Gathering of My Name, which came out in 1991 — the final year of the Cold War. As such, the poem’s title — and its operating conceit — feels borne out of that tension, a tension that, I imagine, has a lot to do with powerlessness, with the feeling of being forced to accept the consequences of the seemingly-hyperbolic decisions made by people with far more power than you. And, what’s more, there’s the resentment caused by keeping your own sort of daily peace — paying your subway fare despite so many reasons not to, refusing to damage property despite so many just reasons to do so — while knowing that the entire world could crumble because of the actions of people who live far above and beyond you.

As such, I return to this poem now because it carries that language of the universal into the present moment, when the world is still reckoning with an essentially non-exhaustive list of things that might bring about the end of the world. Or already have. And, more specifically, it’s absurdly sad to read this poem within the context of an escalating crisis on the Ukraine border, one that brings about those same tensions that must have been at the heart of this poem’s original writing.

Why, this poem asks, do we continue to carry on with our small and polite decisions when the mechanisms put in place by the powerful do not care about such decisions as they grind along their gears toward destruction?

It’s a question that feels so big and unanswerable and scary and absurd and painful and resentment-causing and angry and sad. And it’s not answered by this poem. It is merely held and wondered and offered and sat with. I love the simple prayer that begs for such a simple thing, and how it is inserted right into the heart of this poem:

Grant us a moment
When there’ll be no need
To play it safe.
Give to us the pleasure
Of misdemeanors.

Give to us the pleasure / Of misdemeanors. What a small ask! And a sad one, too — that Eady here is asking for something almost gentle, irreverent, even playfully kind. It’s like stating that you want to behave in a way that just fucks a little bit with the world — not too much. Just a little. It’s like asking to get away with something small, not big at all. Yes, you might say, I want to do something slightly askew. And when you are asked why, maybe you say: because I feel I have been holding the world together for so long with my ordinary acts of kindness. Just let me fuck up a little bit.

There are many injustices in the world, but the injustice of penalizing people in deeply excessive ways for their small fuck ups while so many powerful people continually and knowingly damage the world without consequence is one of the great injustices. To be allowed to fuck up in some small way — that is one of the great graces of being alive.

And I love that word above: misdemeanor. I love Eady’s way of taking it out of the language of prosecution and into the language of poetry. When you say it out loud, your mouth does four different things! It hisses the first syllable, then builds a wall with its tongue against the roof of its mouth, and then breaks that wall to smile as it says mean and stretches the lips wide, and then almost kisses you at the end with its final syllable. It’s a word that gets at the playful irreverence with which Eady starts today’s poem. There’s something childish inherent in the actions described: spitting in the water, tossing a penny off the Empire State Building. Yes, please don’t throw a penny off a skyscraper, but also — there’s a kind of exploratory wonder embedded within the desire to do so. By mentioning such actions, Eady also reminds us how often they don’t occur. Which is another way of saying: our world is held together by simple, overlooked refusals to be unkind. These refusals occur every second of every day. They create an invisible, ordinary web that holds our collective world together while so much threatens to tear it apart.

Though the two poems don’t seem in conversation, I couldn’t help but think of Danusha Laméris’ “Small Kindnesses” while reading today’s poem. Here it is in full:

I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk
down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”
when someone sneezes, a leftover
from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.
And sometimes, when you spill lemons
from your grocery bag, someone else will help you
pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.
We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,
and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile
at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress
to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,
and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.
We have so little of each other, now. So far
from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,
have my seat,” “Go ahead — you first,” “I like your hat.”

That line — We have so little of each other, now — feels like an echo of Eady’s plea at the end of today’s poem: Give us a taste of the stolen world. There is a world that has been stolen from us, a world full of what “We’ve been taught / Not to handle.”

One power of poetry is that it can reframe our daily experience in language that allows us to see it true (or truer, if there are multiple kinds of truths, or full and deeper spectrums of a single truth itself). There was so much at the time of this poem’s writing that threatened to annihilate the world in one fell swoop. And there is so much now that promises the same, whether the climate crisis, near-constant war, state-sanctioned violence, absurd and devastating disparities in wealth, or debt. And more, and more. To live amidst it all and make the ongoing, daily choice to be just relatively decent while also knowing that your decency almost certainly does not save the world — I never thought of that as living within a “stolen world” until I encountered Eady’s language. But it is stolen, isn’t it? While the powerful make decisions that can potentially disrupt, radically alter, or end the lives of so many, we pay our bills and hold the door for others. We go on and on in our own world, experiencing life and death, holding the knowledge that it could fundamentally changed by power almost-always beyond our control at any time. Which means there is another world, too. One stolen from us, hovering just above our dailiness — full of “secrets behind the door marked Restricted.”

And maybe that’s why I’m thinking of Laméris’ poem today, too. Because although Eady’s poem does not seem to be about kindness, I think it is about kindness. I think there is an unsaid text underneath the poem that simply says: Look how often we are gentle with one another. And, while Eady’s poem makes the argument that perhaps we have been made by the powerful to be docile and conformist in enacting such decency, and that we deserve — and we do, we certainly do — to rage in anger and frustration, Laméris makes another argument, just as stunning:

What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,
have my seat,” “Go ahead — you first,” “I like your hat.”

While Eady’s poem focuses on our justified retribution, Laméris wonders aloud if our collective decency is where holiness resides. Isn’t that beautiful? That, even though some degree of power has stolen a world from us, there is the world we live in, and it is holy. And it is holy not because of any conception of god, or some higher power, but rather because we have made it so through kindness. Perhaps that sounds corny as hell, but I don’t think so. It makes me think of something David Graeber wrote in Debt: A 5,000 Year History, that I have certainly quoted on here before:

This is why in the immediate wake of great disasters—a flood, a blackout, a revolution or economic collapse—people tend to behave the same way, reverting to a kind of rough-and-ready communism. Hierarchies, markets and the like become luxuries that no one can really afford. Anyone who has lived through such a moment can speak to the way strangers become sisters and brothers, and human society itself seems to be reborn.

Later, he sums it up:

We are not just talking about cooperation. Communism is the foundation of all human sociability. It makes society possible.

I think of all the cigarettes I have given to others and all the cigarettes I have bummed from others. I think of all the things carried for me and held for me when I wandered around in a full-length leg brace and a cane for almost two months. I think of the time, almost seven years ago, when I passed out on a crowded subway after work and awoke to find myself in a seat on the train with a Snickers bar in my hand and someone gently holding my fingers, telling me as I awoke that she would walk me home if I needed the company. It was not the fault of anyone who helped me in that moment or any other moment that the structures of our world are ableist and don’t account for issues of mobility, or that the trains are crowded and hot and full of police who will enact violence on someone for something as simple and bare and essential as needing a free ride. People did what they could in the world they lived in. And people still do this. They do this all of the time. For nothing. For absolutely nothing.

And maybe what I love the most about Eady’s poem today is that such ongoing kindness does deserve mention. It deserves mention and it deserves more. It always does and always will. We live in a world that, because of the perpetual message of capitalism, encourages us to award only those whose trying results in some kind of measurable outcome. As such, while a “stolen world” operates its grinding, determined, dangerous mechanism above, it is important to recognize that simply being alive is an act of great determination and effort. Offering kindness in the midst of that effort is, as Laméris writes, a holy thing.

It is such gentle, tender, hard work to keep a thing alive. If you forget to water the plants, they die. If you forget something briefly, for just a short time, you might lose whatever it was you were trying to protect. That is one story of the world, I think. A story of gentleness. A story of the choice to be gentle, nearly every second of every day, and a story of how so many people make that choice without recognition or reward, despite the way that their circumstances might justify them not being gentle, or being forgetful, or being anything but constant and trying and tender. Perhaps it is this world that is holy, and not any other world. And perhaps it is holy because of that story. Because of the way it sometimes makes no sense, because of how absurd it is that we are so kind, even when it does not seem that way, even when we sometimes aren’t.