It’s practically my subject, my theme: solitude and community; the weirdness and terrors of solitude: the stifling and consolations of community. Also, the consolations of solitude.
Derek Mahon
Everything Is Waiting For You
by David Whyte
After Derek Mahon
Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone. As if life
were a progressive and cunning crime
with no witness to the tiny hidden
transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,
even you, at times, have felt the grand array;
the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding
out your solo voice. You must note
the way the soap dish enables you,
or the window latch grants you freedom.
Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.
The stairs are your mentor of things
to come, the doors have always been there
to frighten you and invite you,
and the tiny speaker in the phone
is your dream-ladder to divinity.
Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the
conversation. The kettle is singing
even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
have left their arrogant aloofness and
seen the good in you at last. All the birds
and creatures of the world are unutterably
themselves. Everything is waiting for you.
There has always been a link between diplomacy and poetry. The exultation of a greater community, done beautifully, artistically crosses the boundaries of understanding, the essence of effective politicians and poets. The list of poet diplomats goes back to Chaucer, Thomas Wyatt and extends to Gabriela Mistral, Saint-John Perse, Pablo Neruda, Czeslaw Milosz, Saint-John Perse and Octavio Paz. That no contemporary poets are on my list is more a function of my ignorance of modern conflicts and writers, as I am sure there are a host of poets waging diplomacy around the world, at least I hope there are. War, love and poetry are constants of the human condition. It’s a bit of rock, paper, scissors, how they are connected, cause and effect, effect and cause, I’ll let you decide which conquers which, but it the art of poetry and art of diplomacy share the same language.
Derek Mahon was born 2 years after W. B. Yeats death. Mahon left Belfast and studied and worked in England, France, the United States and Canada throughout his life, only returning to Ireland late in life. These two poems are bookends of the poetic mindset of the quote above. War has a way of reminding us of the wish to become a hermit at the same time we humbly appreciate the blessing that can be community.
Fourteen Lines 