You cannot do more than you can do

"today you fill up / with the unyielding force / of your heart"

In my little office under the stairs—back against the bulky water heater, books in piles, analog dials, whispering pipes—I paste poems along the small everywhere of the cinderblock walls. They hang from the exposed copper plumbing like clusters of white blood cells. They are spiritual fixtures in the same way that the chair is a practical one. The chair keeps me upright; the poems keep me alive.

This month—as forces of inequality and intolerance have privileged oligarchy and authority in terrifying new ways—instead of sharing passages from titles in the bookshop at large, I wanted to share a few of the poems in my office. I hope that they might fill and surround you with love and resolve, as they do me. — Joe

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you can not do more
than you can do / it will
take all of us—working
from all sides—to take
it down / the evils of the
world are so great /
the men with hands
that circle mountains /
and we go on making
bread and washing our
clothes / the great hand
holds you / I cannot be
the destroyer of worlds
I am a grain of sand! fling
me into the machine!
what else is there to do?
let them come with their
eyes as guns and their
hands as guns? you can
not do more than you can
do / today you fill up
with the unyielding force
of your heart / and you
are shouting in your own
body the refrain of the
eternal song / you can not
help singing it! how
many times must I
tell you? this is it—this
is the life you get

—Aleah Black

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Mushrooms

Friends are coming
to mushroom this morning
because of the rain
because of the mushrooms
I don’t know one
mushroom from another
but our friends do
we will go to where
there are chanterelles
even though I know
nothing about them
I will eat them

—Esther Cohen

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That They Are There

Earth’s magnetic field turns over once every three hundred thousand years
and the dead will be here when it does. They nestle deeper in their graves
so as not to scare the deer. Some things are illusory, lose their forms
when looked at from up close—the dead are like that. Heaven and fog and ash
trees are like that, too. Of course, these are precisely the things we can’t help
approaching. One morning you walk towards what looks like heaven and end up
drenched, you new blue sweater cold as tin. Cotton dries slowly, if at all.
The deer might be illusory too, but I’ve never been close enough
to know—you’d have to ask the dead. A predicament. You say: Which way
is North? and the dead pretend not to hear. Their field is not magnetic—
it’s bottlebrush, ryegrass, and clay. Instead of “North” and “South,” all of it
is either “Above” or “Beside.” In the next three hundred thousand years
when the field turns over, every other thing will do the same: tree roots
will turn to canopies, feet to wings. Some things are turning already.
You say: Which way is Heaven? and the dead stare up at you like children
quieter than before.

—Daniel Schonning

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Spell

Summon the summoners
The twenty-six enchanters
Spelling silence into sound
They bind and loose
They find and are not found
Recall the river tongues
from Aleph to Styx
Summon the summoners
The shaping shapes
The grounds of sound
The generative grammar
Signs of the Mystery
Inscribed arcana
Runes from the root tree
Written in the deeps

—Malcolm Guite

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The Moon

She’s lying on the asphalt.
Her small belly, her chest,
her forehead, her hands,
her cold feet bare in the night.
A hungry cat paces.
Shrapnel rings
as it hits neighboring
houses already bombed.
The cat grows hungrier.
The cat sees the girl,
her wounds still warm.
Hungrier.
The girl’s father lies next to her
on his back. The backpack he wears
still has the girl’s favorite candy
and a small toy.
The girl was waiting
till they arrived
to eat her lollipop.
The cat gets close
to try the flesh;
a bomb pounds the street.
No flesh, no girl,
no father, no cat.
Nobody is hungry.
The moon overhead
is not the moon.

—Mosab Abu Toha

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The Hymn

It began as an almost inaudible hum,
   low and long for the solar winds
      and far dim galaxies,

a hymn growing louder, for the moon and the sun,
   a song without words for the snow falling,
      for snow conceiving snow

conceiving rain, the rivers rushing without shame,
   the hum turning again higher—into a riff of ridges,
      peaks hard as consonants,

summits and praise for the rocky faults and crust and crevices
   then down down to the roots and rocks and burrows,
      the lakes’ skittery surfaces, wells, oceans, breaking

waves, the salt-deep: the warm bodies moving within it:
   the cold deep: the deep underneath gleaming, some of us rising
      as the planet turned into dawn, some lying down

as it turned into dark; as each of us rested—another woke, standing
   among the cast-off cartons and automobiles;
      we left the factories and stood in the parking lots,

left the subways and stood on sidewalks, in the bright offices,
   in the cluttered yards, in the farmed fields,
      in the mud of the shantytowns, breaking into

harmonies we’d not known possible, finding the chords as we
   found our true place singing in a million
      million keys the human hymn of praise for every

something else there is and ever was and will be:
   the song growing louder and rising.
      (Listen, I, too, believed it was a dream.)

—Marie Howe

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Vision

I watched from the earth,

low in dry grass, trying

not to breathe, blink, or stir.

Gray mist spilt from the lips

of men dressed like Pilgrims, like Custer,

like Mounties. I don’t know when

I was. Or where. Everywhere,

everywhen, was the point.

Dark morning or late day, I

watched continents reunite,

watched mountains kiss and blur.

All that had been severed

was married back to itself.

Deep seams of reunification

scarred the whole of the earth,

the error of division mended—

or else it was time itself I saw,

rolling forward and back. I saw

white men unloading figures

from ships, trucks, crates. Efficient

and perfunctory, like art handlers,

only the bodies were living: bound

at the wrists, iron complicating

their necks. I strained to watch

and comprehend the system, its

logics, these agents operating

in obedience to mechanics

and nothing more. How do I say

that what I was shown I saw

from farther away than a body will

ever go? Past history and argument.

Past victors and vanquishment.

Up and off. Or down and in

to the trillion atoms swirling in

every cell. Inarguable. Under

a tent in June, a whole clan

of giddy families gathered one

buggy night. Bonfire light. I was

watching from tall grass and then—

So soon? But how?—from a tree’s

high bough, strung up, swaying

to the mob’s intention, that old

familiar song all know or come to learn.

Before I could ache or yell, I swept

past the stars I recognize, past

the edges of this or any night,

past the clamor of humankind

until I was no longer alone, and

it was not for my own body that I cried.

Not for vengeance or mercy. Not

for any single sin, nor any blood spilt

that was not all blood. For the moan

wrung from all throats and all men

all seasons on earth. By which I mean:

Divine was the grief. The whole

unceasing universe gathered to watch

and ache as the earth whirred and spun

in its place, as the families packed up,

the armies dispersed, the rivers

swole and overflowed their banks.

—Tracy K. Smith