As often, when I am looking for words of substance I turn to poetry from one of those poets who have been my companion for a long time. Denise Levertov is one whose work I have read and pondered, for a long time. Some of it is worth pondering, some was so immediate, so woven with context that its fabric quickly fades with time. One reason Levertov is to be cherished is that, at her best, her poetry has a long view, she understands the importance of time and patience in the formation and growth of hope. This was a woman who wore her heart on her sleeve, and who wrote her heart in her poems. And the longer life went on the more she became a poet whose political and ethical vision burned with moral passion and compassion. From her opposition to the Vietnam war, the atrocities in Cambodia, El Salvador, Iraq, and global threats of nuclear armaments, ecological crises and economic injustices, she wrote with anger, pity, love, and with hope. For Levertov, hope is inherently patient, involves waiting, summons us to take the long view, literally, longing for hope.
I remember my first year of learning Latin at school I came across the little word "diu", meaning "for a long time". I never forgot it, I liked it from the first day I learned it. Perhaps the sense of permanence, the longevity and spaciousness of time implied by those three letters, "diu", for a long time, appealed to a boy with his own hopes and forward looking into a future yet to come. Levertov's poem For the New Year 1981 is a poem about hope, the patient multiplication of gestures that take the long view and make space in human hearts and relatedness for hope. The Van Gogh painting becomes self explanatory after reading the poem
For the New year 1981
I have a small grain of hope—
one small crystal that gleams
clear colors out of transparency.
I need more.
I break off a fragment
to send you.
Please take
this grain of a grain of hope
so that mine won’t shrink.
Please share your fragment
so that yours will grow.
Only so, by division,
will hope increase,
like a clump of irises, which will cease to flower
unless you distribute
the clustered roots, unlikely source—
clumsy and earth-covered—
of grace.
–Denise Levertov
Comments