Gwendolyn Brooks's "To the Young Who Want to Die"

Thoughts on the certain and uncertain.

To the Young Who Want to Die

Sit down. Inhale. Exhale.
The gun will wait. The lake will wait.
The tall gall in the small seductive vial
will wait will wait:
will wait a week: will wait through April.
You do not have to die this certain day.
Death will abide, will pamper your postponement.
I assure you death will wait. Death has
a lot of time. Death can
attend to you tomorrow. Or next week. Death is
just down the street; is most obliging neighbor;
can meet you any moment.

You need not die today.
Stay here—through pout or pain or peskyness.
Stay here. See what the news is going to be tomorrow.

Graves grow no green that you can use.
Remember, green's your color. You are Spring.

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I first encountered this poem through Ross Gay’s latest book, Inciting Joy, not realizing that I had also encountered it earlier through one of his poems, “Sorrow Is Not My Name,” which ends:

But look; my niece is running through a field
calling my name. My neighbor sings like an angel
and at the end of my block is a basketball court.
I remember. My color's green. I'm spring.

When Gay references Brooks’s poem above in a long, winding, critical, and vulnerable essay on the performance of masculinity, he writes that, upon reading Brooks’s poem, he “tore that page out and stuck it in a cheap Ikea frame when I was cracking up,” and that the poem “is always within reach.” Later (he references the poem in a long footnote, the use of which — the footnote, I mean — is so prevalent throughout the book, which I love) he writes:

There is a library of poems that have kept me on this side, poems that, in a way of speaking, also “make nothing happen,” the nothing in this case that we “die this certain day.”

Here, Gay is calling back to an earlier essay of his, where he critiques the oft-cited quote of Auden’s: poetry makes nothing happen. I should say: he does not critique the quote itself, but the way that it is often deployed, how people often take the quote to mean that poetry doesn’t do anything. Gay disagrees, and I think I do too, now.

Gay thinks that we think about the grammatical construction of such a line just a little bit wrong. We think of that phrase nothing happen as one single thing. As the absence of something being made. We don’t think of the way that nothing is something that can still happen. As in: nothing is a thing that can happen. Yes, in our world, we often think of something as the only thing that can happen. And, subsequently, we often think of something as inherently good. But what about nothing? What does it look like, to make nothing — as in, to make space, or peace, or the absence of a kind of something that might’ve looked, today, like death or violence? Sometimes, making nothing happen might be the best kind of something to make.

And so, after reading Gay’s book, I read Brooks’s poem. And I kept it open in a tab — this digitized and temporary version of an Ikea frame that is nowhere near the real — all week. And I searched for it, whatever book it came from, and I didn’t find it, but I found, instead, this beautiful essay by the wonderful poet Bernard Ferguson (which calls to mind, now, a kind of litany or genre of these essays, these essays of searching for the work of those who are gone, because, feeling moved or enlivened or in need of solidarity, you cannot rest until you find out more — a genre, I think, that owes some origin to this essay by Alice Walker, in search of Zora Neale Hurston).

In that essay, Ferguson writes:

I have friends that speak about the art that saved their lives, that made them feel seen, that gave them language for the cloud hanging heavy above their hair. Every year and every decade seems to want to, at some point, inflict its worse upon us, and so the balm needs to be perpetual; not so much universal as potent, and liberally available. Brooks’s poem is one such balm.

This poem today is a balm. And I think I am thinking of it because, yes, it is April, which means it is spring. And I think I am thinking of it, too, because sometimes — yes, maybe often lately — I find myself thinking so much of death, not of dying, no, but rather of the presence of death right there on the other side of the thin door that marks our presentness. I have been encountering that presence so much lately, in what I read, in the world around me. To not encounter such a thing, I think, is to not be alive.

Alice McDermott, in The Ninth Hour, writes:

Isn’t it funny how we all die at the same time? Always at the end of our lives.

And here’s Ross Gay, from — yes — a footnote in the aforementioned book:

There really is nothing more interesting about us than that we die. I think I really think that.

And here, too, is Gwendolyn Brooks, from today’s poem:

I assure you death will wait. Death has
a lot of time. Death can
attend to you tomorrow. Or next week. Death is
just down the street; is most obliging neighbor;
can meet you any moment.

It’s funny that, as I’ve grown older, the one aspect of uncertainty that no longer feels uncertain is the if. I have learned, sometimes with laughter and sometimes with tragedy and often with whatever sits in between those things, that the if will most certainly happen. The if you are worried about happening or not happening. It will probably happen, eventually. But the how, the when — those relationships we have with time, such things always seem to plague my uncertainty. And probably always will.

But I am certain, too, that the very fact of uncertainty will almost certainly be one of the most difficult aspects of life to reckon with.

It’s like how, years ago, in April, when my friend’s mother died, and I traveled with my friends to the hospital to see her, I knew — I was certain — of what was happening, and yet still, sitting in the fluorescent light of the waiting room on the oncology floor, or standing on a corner outside the parking garage smoking a cigarette as we each stood in various ways, trying out strange postures of grief, I wasn’t sure of something, still. Like how we would continue with not just this loss, but with our own grief of this loss and the wider and more tragic grief of our friend’s loss, which was the loss of the same person, only larger. I didn’t know, in other words, what to do with the fact of what was happening. That not-knowing — of loss, of action in the aftermath of loss — is the stuff of life.

I think, while reading this poem, that Gwendolyn Brooks understood that. It makes sense, then, that the most repeated word in today’s poem is will. Will — as in, the future tense of the verb to be. Notice it here:

The tall gall in the small seductive vial
will wait will wait:
will wait a week: will wait through April.

Will wait will wait. I love that Brooks leans on the future tense to offer some degree of certainty in the midst of a present tense of anxiety. In the midst of anxiety, Brooks leverages the certainty of the future — that death will happen — to alleviate the pain of the present. It’s a beautiful, graceful, humble logic. It says that something difficult will certainly, eventually happen — it just does not have to happen now. And, because we live in the now, it extends the grace of that present, living moment — and pushes, just a little bit further out, the certainty of that future, difficult moment.

And what I love, too, is that Brooks then fills the present tense of this poem not with urgency or rushing or relentless action. No, Brooks fills it with the kind of nothing that Gay alludes to. A kind of fullness of space, of live. Here, then, are some of the actions that exist in the present tense of this poem today:

Sit down. Inhale. Exhale.

Stay here...
Stay here

In the present tense of this poem today are verbs like sit, inhale, exhale, stay. They are verbs that communicate a sense of slowness, of care, of love for the space one needs to be fully oneself. In the present tense of this poem is the kind of vocabulary needed to give the space for someone to be all that they need to be in order to be alive. In the present tense, I would argue, is the kind of blueprint one might use as a starting point for joy.

Here, again, is Ross Gay:

What if joy is not only entangled with pain, or suffering, or sorrow, but is also what emerges from how we care for each other through those things?

Later, Gay writes:

Joy is an ember for…unboundaried solidarity.

And so, finally, what I want to say is that I love a poem like today’s. I love a poem that is directly addressed to someone. I love what it communicates about emergence, about solidarity, about art as a place to make the entanglement a body feels with pain into an entanglement that one can live with, an entanglement that can also be a kind of joy, even as it is also a kind of suffering, insofar as both things can — and do — exist at once, in this wild entanglement we call a life. There is no dishonesty in today’s poem. The certainty that Brooks offers is real. It is the certainty of death. The certainty of our fragile nature. This is part of the nothing that poetry makes happen. Brooks does not ask the person she is addressing to be anything more than they are. She does not ask them to be something more than they are. She simply asks them to be. And to find, in such being, a life.

While thinking of today’s poem, I could not help to think, too, of Leon Stokesbury’s “Unsent Message to My Brother in His Pain,” which I wrote about long ago. It reads, in some ways, as a companion poem to Brooks’s poem. I’m sure there are so many poems like this. I am certain that there must be, given as poetry is a place where we are given to vocabulary to resist the idea that every entanglement must be untangled, that every uncertainty must be made certain. Stokesbury’s poem reads, in full:

Please do not die now. Listen.
Yesterday, storm clouds rolled
out of the west like thick muscles.
Lightning bloomed. Such a sideshow
of colors. You should have seen it.
A woman watched with me, then we slept.
Then, when I woke first, I saw
in her face that rest is possible.
The sky, it suddenly seems
important to tell you, the sky
was pink as a shell. Listen
to me. People orbit the moon now.
They must look like flies around
Fatty Arbuckle's head, that new
and that strange. My fellow American,
I bought a French cookbook. In it
are hundreds and hundreds of recipes.
If you come to see me, I shit you not,
we will cook with wine. Listen
to me. Listen to me, my brother,
please don’t go. Take a later flight,
a later train. Another look around.

Notice the present tense in this poem, too. Notice how it repeats that same word, four times over: Listen. How such a word is a cousin to the words of Brooks’s poem: Sit, Inhale, Exhale, Stay. These poems, both Brooks’s and Stokesbury’s, don’t ask anything more of the person they are addressing than to simply slow down, to give themselves space, to be within the world rather than to rush out of it.

Look again at the ending of today’s poem. I think we often think that aging is something to be resisted. That we have to find new ways to be as we get old. But, when I read that final line of today’s poem, I think of the color green as as a reference to our newness. Yes, we think of ourselves as old. And we think of each passing day as a day that marks our aging. But what if this were different? What if each passing day was not a passing day, a marker of our aging, but rather another attempt at newness? Yes, what if we think of the green in this poem not as a color, but as a word that means new, as in not yet ready, as in they’re too green for this, and what if we think of this as life, and then think of how, each day, yes, we are a little older, and yes, we are too, a little greener — green as in newer, as in each day, we are, even through our aging, a little new for all that getting older. Do you see what I mean? Green’s our color. We’re Spring.

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Some notes:

1. As I will continue to mention, Writers Against the War on Gaza has been a powerful resource that has, in these days, reminded me of all the various potentials for solidarity in this moment. You can follow them on Instagram here.

2. Here is a list of urgent fundraisers for Gaza, if you have the means.

3. The independent press distributor Small Press Distribution (SPD) just shut down without any warning. This article provides good context. If you have the means, consider supporting any of the presses affected. Here is a list.

4. If you’ve read any of the recent newsletters, you’ve perhaps noticed that I am offering a subscription option. This is functioning as a kind of “tip jar.” If you would like to offer your monetary support as a form of generosity, please consider becoming a paid subscriber below. There is no difference in what you receive as a free or paid subscriber; to choose the latter is simply an option to exercise your generosity if you feel willing. I am grateful for you either way. Thanks for your readership.