Humberto Ak’abal's "Flowers" (translated by Michael Bazzet)

Thoughts on power and play.

Flowers

Roots

send flowers to tell us

what earth is like

on the inside.

And flowers

fade, they die,

because out here

life is shit.


from If Today Were Tomorrow (Milkweed, 2024)

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I first encountered Humberto Ak’abal’s name at the bottom of a poem by Michael Bazzett, a poem that does what so much of the poetry I love does — how it surprises me out of a fixed relationship to the world and into a relationship that feels a little more like love, because it contains a little more acceptance and a lot more wonder. In that poem of Bazzett’s, which tells the story of a father soothing a son’s worry about a monster in the closet, he writes:

I sensed
its need to disappear completely and knew it was only
me who could grant such peace, or lash out where its
head might lay, and I made my choice, unswayed, I think,
by the scent of fear and closed the door and looked
to where he lay in bed and said, There’s nothing there.

It was no shock, then, to find that Bazzett had translated Ak’abal’s work, which is work that — in these short exercises of attention and subversion — makes me rethink my relationship to the world.

In one of Ak’abal’s poems, “Prayer,” he writes:

In church
the only prayer you hear
comes from the trees
they turned into pews.

It’s a poem that sits deeper in the body with the knowledge that it was reported, just a few days ago, that more than a third of the trees in the world are at risk of extinction.

Today’s poem sits in conversation with such a tragedy. And, as it sits in conversation with such tragedy, it also gives us a new way of looking at it, which is to say a new way of looking at the world. And that’s part of what poetry offers: a new way of looking. Or an old one. A way of looking, nonetheless. An important one.

The beginning of one of Bazzett’s translator notes about Ak’abal’s work says the following:

Humberto Ak’abal (1952-2019) was a K’iche’ Mayan poet born in Momostenango, in the western highlands of Guatemala. The highlands are lush, with mountains covered in cloud forest, the trees draped with bromeliads and furred with moss, well adapted to taking a sip from the sideways-drifting morning fog. The connection to place in Ak’abal’s work is palpable; the language seems to arise from the land itself, where stones speak, wooden benches remember being trees, and there is laughter in a rain shower. As Ak’abal himself said: “My words hold the dampness of rain, /the tears of morning dew, and it cannot /be otherwise, because they were / brought down from the mountain.”

I love, especially, two things about this paragraph. I love the notion of a language that “seems to arise from the land itself.” And I love that phrase of Ak’abal’s: it cannot be otherwise. It reinforces a kind of steadfast belief and acknowledgment of what is true, and what we so often dismiss as child’s play, the way the term figurative language is deemed to be merely that — figurative — and not literal at the same. Because yes, words can hold the dampness of rain. You just merely have to expand your idea of what that word holding means. It can mean so much. As so much can.

And I love the idea of child’s play, especially. I love what such play can remind us of life. This happens in poetry often, and it happens, I think, in short poems especially — these distillations of experience that, so compressed, shine outward in ways that shatter us into surprise, or laughter, or sorrow, or joy.

I’m thinking of a few poems by Andrea Cohen that do this. Such as this one, “Refusal to Mourn,” which reads:

In lieu of
flowers, send
him back.

Or this one, “Directional”:

He held
a match

up to see
which way

the dark
was going.

And I always think of Bill Knott’s “Alternate Fates,” which — child’s-play-like — subverts the horror (and meaning, and purpose) of war:

What if right
in the middle of a battle
across the battlefield the wind
blew thousands of
lottery tickets, what then?

I am reminded, reading these poems, of how my mom, when I was really young, often talked about wanting to write a children’s book. There was a house that was built on a plot of land not far from where I grew up, and I remember my mom driving me past it and lamenting, nearly always, about the trees that used to be where the house stood. She wanted to write a book — If Trees Could Talk — about what they would’ve seen, and what they would’ve said. Something about history, I imagine, and something about loss, I know now. Back then, I didn’t think much of the idea. I thought it nice, but didn’t see the particular wonder at the heart of it. I’m ashamed of that. And I think now about how beautiful that sentiment was on the part of my mom — to consider the world not just as it is, but as it was, and as it could have been. And maybe should’ve been.

I see in this something that Ak’abal writes in another poem, “Birth”:

Poets are born old:

as the years pass
we make ourselves
into children.

There, in that moment of my childhood, maybe my mom and I were like ships briefly passing by one another at different speeds and, somehow, in different moments, on a journey toward the same destination. She, older than me, remaking herself into a child. And me, her child, trying to unlearn the judgment and shame we are so often born into, and that, for some people, comes to define adulthood — or life.

And so, in thinking if Ak’abal’s work today, I think of how it holds all of this — the wonderment of children, the imagination of a world that talks to us, the reality made more real through the use of the figurative — in its grasp. It’s there from the poem’s opening lines:

Roots

send flowers to tell us

what earth is like

on the inside.

Read these lines and tell me that you will continue to look at flowers in the same way as you used to before. You won’t, will you? You will, as I will, for perhaps forever, think of them as the earth reminding you of something. Of what it is like on the inside. Which is to say: beautiful. And maybe you won’t believe that. Maybe you’ll think of this poem the next time you see a flower. And maybe you’ll see that burnt orange mum, that gold-green hydrangea, and think, briefly, of how the beauty of their petals evoke something of the inner working of this world. A reminder, perhaps, of what could be but isn’t. And then maybe you’ll shake your head in disbelief, and, despite being reminded of this poem, go on not believing it. Maybe that will happen. But still, even so. For a moment, you held language in your head that held the world a different way. The way words can hold the dampness of rain. You held that, briefly, before the disbelief. And so, briefly, you reminded yourself how to believe. Which is another way of reminding yourself how to hope.

I thought of this poem and this idea of how to hold a different way of looking at the world as I read Barry Lynn’s latest cover story for Harper’s, on the power big tech has over our decisions and our lives, and how such power has been encouraged, time and time again, by lawmakers and more. In that story, he writes:

It is hard to overstate the effects of these changes. Look at almost every crisis in America today and down the chain of causation we will find a monopolist…How far we must drive to a hospital or to find fresh produce. The cost of medicine, milk, and chicken. The vast and growing inequality of wealth, political power, and control. The rise of the radical right. The surge in racism and homophobia. The attacks on reproductive choice and marriage. The collapse of our news media. In every instance, the concentration of control has played a big role or even the main role.

It is harder still to overstate the intellectual effects. On their way to making the world safe for the master, Bork, Posner, and the other neoliberals also radically altered how we understand the purpose of the law, which they reconceptualized as an economic “science.”

I was struck by that phrase — making the world safe for the master. Here, Lynn is talking about how economists and other people with the ears of those in power were able to ensure that laws and policies were in place to protect and elevate the super-powerful — the tech giants, those with the ability to influence how we think, move, and act.

It’s such an interesting turn of phrase — safe for the master — because it encapsulates, so succinctly, how the world has turned to the “shit” that Ak’abal names in his poem today. I think of how, when we privilege the safety of corporations and empires over the safety of everyone else — those who are living in this world, thirsting in this world, hungering in this world, breathing in this world, making daily decisions in this world, suffering violence in this world — then we are privileging a point of view that rules and lords over the world rather than one that lives with and of the world. We create a world where the very idea that a poem such as today’s expresses — that there is a real love and beauty that emanates from the world, one that is not replicated in our world — could be viewed as dangerous to those who hold power, because it postulates that the world that the powerful are creating, through each algorithmically defined decision and each dropped bomb, is shittier than the world that existed long before they destroyed it.

I am reminded, as I read today’s poem, that what is safe for the powerful is almost certainly dangerous for everyone else. And is, without question, less loving than any other possibility.

Poetry has been, for me, a place to witness people confronting such power with imagination and criticism, even and especially when such confrontation feels difficult to encounter. Here’s a poem by Wendell Berry that does exactly that:

1. How much poison are you willing
to eat for the success of the free
market and global trade? Please
name your preferred poisons.

2. For the sake of goodness, how much
evil are you willing to do?
Fill in the following blanks
with the names of your favorite
evils and acts of hatred.

3. What sacrifices are you prepared
to make for culture and civilization?
Please list the monuments, shrines,
and works of art you would
most willingly destroy.

4. In the name of patriotism and
the flag, how much of our beloved
land are you willing to desecrate?
List in the following spaces
the mountains, rivers, towns, farms
you could most readily do without.

5. State briefly the ideas, ideals, or hopes,
the energy sources, the kinds of security,
for which you would kill a child.
Name, please, the children whom
you would be willing to kill. 

And poetry has been a place for me to see people modeling a radical love — of self, of others, of world — that offers the possibility for hope. Which is another way of saying a morning that never ends.

Humberto Ak’abal might agree:

The only day in life
where the sun doesn’t set
is called

hope.

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Some ongoing notes:

1. Writers Against the War on Gaza has circulated a letter organizing writers, editors, and artists, urging them not to work with “Israeli cultural institutions that are complicit or have remained silent observers of the overwhelming oppression of Palestinians.” You can find (and sign, as I have) that letter here.

2. As per a post I saw by the poet Niina Pollari, a bunch of presses and people are organizing in support of damage to western North Carolina as a result of Hurricane Helene. You can read the post for more information, and find links to donate here. When you submit your donation receipt, one of the presses involved will send a book your way.

3. Awhile ago, I started following Workshops 4 Gaza, an organization of writers putting together donation-based writing workshops and readings in support of Palestine. You can follow them here and get more information about them here.

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.