Yusef Komunyakaa's "Rock Me, Mercy"

Thoughts on depth.

Rock Me, Mercy

The river stones are listening
because we have something to say.
The trees lean closer today.
The singing in the electrical woods
has gone dumb. It looks like rain
because it is too warm to snow.
Guardian angels, wherever you're hiding,
we know you can't be everywhere at once.
Have you corralled all the pretty wild
horses? The memory of ants asleep
in daylilies, roses, holly, & larkspur.
The magpies gaze at us, still
waiting. River stones are listening.
But all we can say now is,
Mercy, please, rock me.


from The Emperor of Water Clocks (FSG, 2015)

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I, like perhaps many people whose exposure to poetry was through massive contemporary anthologies taught in high school English classes, first read Yusef Komunyakaa when I was, I think, seventeen.

You can probably guess the poem — “Facing It,” a widely-anthologized poem with an ending that is inherently and entirely unforgettable:

A white vet's image floats   
closer to me, then his pale eyes   
look through mine. I'm a window.   
He's lost his right arm   
inside the stone. In the black mirror   
a woman’s trying to erase names:   
No, she's brushing a boy's hair.

Unfortunately, I stopped there for a long time when it came to Komunyakaa’s work. And I thought of him, quite narrowly, as a poet of the stuff of war: violence and its aftermath, the gruff language of brutality. And though Komunyakaa does write about war, given his time in Vietnam, he is — as I have learned, gratefully, over the years — a poet of such beauty and tenderness, a poet who understands, yes, the language of brutality, but understands, too, how such language does not serve us. He is a poet who, as he wrote of Galway Kinnell:

went among those who had half
a voice

He also has, without question, a voice for the ages.

Here, for example, is his voice reading today’s poem over the instrumentation of David Cieri and Mike Brown, the latter of whom I once had the privilege of performing with once, at a reading series called Gavagai, where I read my own poems while he improvised his own music. It was a surreal experience, strange and fascinating and lovely, trying to listen to the music beneath my poems while reading my own words. That feels like ages ago, though I think it has only been years.

Today’s poem, which was written in response to the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary, is a poem that sees both the brutality of this world and its gentleness. And it is a poem that holds both such things in its hands. That act of holding is evident throughout Komunyaaka’s work, which is part of why I want to write about it today. Not just because of the heart-sorrow and angst and worry and longing at the heart of today’s poem, but also because of the way Komunyaaka’s example of willingness — and it is a kind of willingness — to enter the marrow of things, where no thing is perfect and where every thing is life and death at once, is an example of approaching the world that feels particularly apt today, and yesterday, and tomorrow.

Sometimes a poem doesn’t give me comfort. It gives me depth. As if, while standing in the shallow end of the pool, I notice that the bottom of the pool is no longer there, and that I am treading water. Deep water. A poem gives me that depth, which might seem like the kind of thing that could make someone anxious, but it also gives me — through its way of seeing — a way of treading the very water it offers me. It gives me a way to say you can do it, too, as I am doing, as we all are. It doesn’t lie. It says it is hard. It says, too, that we are capable. A poem can do that. It can be another person in the ocean with you, showing you how to swim. And another, and another. I think that’s part of why I read. I want to know how deep the ocean is, and I want to know — despite whatever fear follows — that I can remain there, in that depth, with others.

And Komunyaaka's work does that for me. Notice it here, in the opening to “Fortress,” which names, so clearly, what we are capable of:

Now I begin with these two hands
held before me as blessing & weapon

Or here, in “Precious Metals,” a poem that holds both the desire for forgiveness and the desire for justice at the same time:

Please
look into my eyes & tap a finger
against my heart to undo
every wrong I've ever done,
every infraction done to me
in the country of crab apple
& honeysuckle.

Or here, finally, in his poem of solidarity with Palestine, “Envoy to Palestine,” where he writes:

My sacred dead
is the dust of restless plains I come from,
& I love when it gets into my eyes & mouth
telling me of the roads behind & ahead.

Only a poet would love dust in their eyes. But isn’t it a worthwhile love when framed through Komunyakaa’s gaze? How the dust reminds him of his own history and the history of so many? How dust is, on earth, perhaps the best example of solidarity that exists — all of us ground to the smallest particles, picked up by wind, blown across the world, together? Only a poet would love dust in their eyes, and only a poet would teach us to love it, too.

Today’s poem teaches me something, as well. I hold the reminder that it is a response to tragedy close, which is part of why I am holding it close today, at a moment when life feels like the tragedy of today followed by the tragedy of tomorrow, an ongoing litany of unspeakable violence made not just speakable, but real, to so many — in Palestine, in Lebanon, in so many places felt by so many people who have, because of the tools of those in power, half a voice, or less than half a voice, or even have been made to have no voice at all. And then there is the tragedy, too, of listening to those with voices, amplified and broadcasted and manicured, who try to render just what is unjust. Who play with language in a way that unhinges it from its coalition-building possibility and makes it a kind of population-tamer. Something that saves the face of war but not the lives of people.

And so, today’s poem feels forever-here. Which is awful. But true.

Notice how it begins:

The river stones are listening
because we have something to say.
The trees lean closer today.

Here, Komunyakaa subverts that lovely idea that we have something to learn from the world. And I think he does this, I imagine, with great sorrow. I think this poem is trying to say something like: after such awful violence that is so brutal to the world in a way that feels unnatural, the world turns to us — who perpetrate such violence — to make sense of the violence. I imagine Komunyakaa depicting the rocks, in one way, as the upturned eyes of a company of workers looking at a CEO as the CEO is about to speak. The workers are looking and listening, as the rocks are, out of a kind of learned deference and passivity. They shouldn’t have to listen, but violence has taught them to, awful thing it is. The evils perpetuated on the earth have been beyond what the earth could do to itself, and so the earth turns to us — who need it, though we will never say it — out of need. It’s an awful artistry here, on the part of Komunyakaa. We don’t deserve to be listened to by the rocks and the trees, but our violence makes us loud enough to be heard.

And yet, and yet, and yet. Komunyakaa then enacts — while holding that hubristic human impulse in his hands — the humility that we so desperately need:

Guardian angels, wherever you're hiding,
we know you can't be everywhere at once.

And so, this poem becomes a poem that holds so much at once. It holds the earth turning toward us just as we turn toward the heavens. It holds our violence and our humility. It holds our helplessness. It holds, again, our love of the world, its beauty that need never be tamed:

Have you corralled all the pretty wild
horses? 

But this poem is a poem that holds our need, most of all, which is a word that sings with mercy, which is a word that guides this poem:

But all we can say now is,
Mercy, please, rock me.

What is mercy? It can mean grace. It can mean pity. Both of those words mean different things. In the end, I think it means hold me. I think it means hold me, even though I know we’re both not long for this, for any of it at all. There is real beauty in admitting that need — admitting, a word that means, literally, letting go. So what is mercy? Maybe it is what comes after someone lets go of all they have held on to in the name of power or greed or violence or control, and then asks, after such letting go, to be held. Maybe mercy is the act of holding someone who has, finally, let go.

The great Lucille Clifton has a book titled Mercy, and in that book, she has a poem where she names:

what has been made
can be unmade

That poem ends:

it is perhaps 
a final chance

not the end of the world
of a world

Mercy, I think, allows for this. This space where one world — our allegiance to power, to individual achievement rather than solidarity — can end so that another be made. It’s a feeling — the need for mercy is — that, I think, I feel a lot lately. It’s that empty space at the very bottom of the body. It’s that place where today’s poem comes from, that place after tragedy, where the world turns to you to make sense of it, and you have nothing to say other than your longing to be held. I think a lot of us are probably at that place now, as people experience unbearable loss, as people bear witness, constantly, to such loss. That emptiness I feel is, I think, a longing. For grace, for joy, for communion, for mercy.

In that same book, Clifton has a poem where she asks:

how will I forgive myself
for trying to bear the weight of this
and trying to bear the weight also
of writing the poem
about this?

Hold those lines close for a bit. Let them linger. Isn’t that also the question at the heart of Komunyakaa’s poem today? And isn’t that, perhaps, also one of the questions at the heart of our lives? It’s like how Beckett wrote: you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on. How can we forgive ourselves for going on? Can we forgive ourselves at all? But we must go on, right? And when the trees bend their branches to listen to us, because of all the strength we are supposed to have, and when we have nothing to say because of all the ways our strength has been abused for the wrong purpose, how will we forgive ourselves, then? Earlier in that text, Beckett writes: the words fail, the voice fails. But later: I’ll go on, you must say words, as long as there are any. We must go on, I think. Even if we can’t. We’ll go on.

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Some ongoing notes:

1. In my last newsletter, I wrote about the poetry of Marcellus Williams. If you feel moved, you can donate to the Midwest Innocence Project, which worked to free Marcellus Williams, here. You can donate to the wider-reaching Innocence Project here.

2. 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.

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