“Poet”

The Times are not right for a poet.
The Times are right for a poet.

My pastor friend at City Light Community Ministries’ Hope Center for friends in need, many having been displaced to the streets, grins as he calls me the Poet. I know it’s a pleasantry, a tender appellation, a kindly joke the friends enjoy. I love them for it.

They are the Poet, their lives ringing with a poetry one of my favorite published poets, Daryl Jones, says: “enter[s] the brain and shoot[s] straight to the heart.” He was praising Jonathan Fink’s new book of poems Don’t Do It–We Love You, My Heart.*

Daryl’s poems follow the same trajectory. I am thinking especially of his poem “To Hold,” published in the most recent Southern Poetry Review, Volume 62, Issue 2, p. 41. The poem is a beautiful epithalamium for the poet’s wife. It also speaks to me of my friends at City Light come for a hot meal and companionship, noontime Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Sunday morning breakfast and church. “To Hold” alludes to the marriage vows–“To have and to hold,” with holding being a lifetime’s promise and challenge.

The poem develops the imagistic conceit of a “spindly pine” holding on, right-angled, to “this steep hillside, this slanting world / of rocky, iron-poor soil,” and growing, its stubborn determination “to stay,” prevailing “against whatever snowy blasts may shake its limbs, / whatever winds and torrents of rain.”

The final lines celebrate for me the courage, the hope, and even the uncompromising joy of my unanticipated City Light companions holding on, holding out, against a hostile environment, “keep[ing] the earth from slipping away.”