The bridges that connect ideas across time

Sometimes ideas connect across time and cultures. Sometimes we feel the connection more than we know it. And sometimes the connection is more like one of those swaying bridges like the one above in West Virginia that connects a house to a main road than it is like anything else. 

My Facebook friend Kristin Kennedy, who has been mentioned many times on this blog, posted the following poem by Tom Hirons the other day:


IN THE MEANTIME

Meanwhile, flowers still bloom.
The moon rises, and the sun.
Babies smile and somewhere,
Against all odds,
Two people are falling in love.

Strangers share cigarettes and jokes.

Light plays on the surface of water.

Grace occurs on unlikely streets

And we hold each other fast

Against entropy, the fires and the flood.

Life leans toward living

And, while death claims all things at the end,

There were such precious times between,

In which everything was radiant

And we loved, again, this world.

For some reason this reminded me of Nazim Hikmet's poem "On Living." That poem helped inspire me to start this blog a long time ago. The two poems meet somewhere but I'm not sure where exactly that is. Perhaps they meet at the points of optimism and taking taking the long view and loving life. Nazim Hikmet (1902-1963) was a communist who died in exile. He is Turkey's most popular poet. Tom Hirons is English-Scot, a poet and a storyteller. Here is "On Living":

Living is no laughing matter:
	you must live with great seriousness
		like a squirrel, for example—
   I mean without looking for something beyond and above living,
		I mean living must be your whole occupation.
Living is no laughing matter:
	you must take it seriously,
	so much so and to such a degree
   that, for example, your hands tied behind your back,
                                            your back to the wall,
   or else in a laboratory
	in your white coat and safety glasses,
	you can die for people—
   even for people whose faces you've never seen,
   even though you know living
	is the most real, the most beautiful thing.
I mean, you must take living so seriously
   that even at seventy, for example, you'll plant olive trees—
   and not for your children, either,
   but because although you fear death you don't believe it,
   because living, I mean, weighs heavier.

II

Let's say we're seriously ill, need surgery—
which is to say we might not get up
			from the white table.
Even though it's impossible not to feel sad
			about going a little too soon,
we'll still laugh at the jokes being told,
we'll look out the window to see if it's raining,
or still wait anxiously
		for the latest newscast. . . 
Let's say we're at the front—
	for something worth fighting for, say.
There, in the first offensive, on that very day,
	we might fall on our face, dead.
We'll know this with a curious anger,
        but we'll still worry ourselves to death
        about the outcome of the war, which could last years.
Let's say we're in prison
and close to fifty,
and we have eighteen more years, say,
                        before the iron doors will open.
We'll still live with the outside,
with its people and animals, struggle and wind—
                                I  mean with the outside beyond the walls.
I mean, however and wherever we are,
        we must live as if we will never die.

III

This earth will grow cold,
a star among stars
               and one of the smallest,
a gilded mote on blue velvet—
	  I mean this, our great earth.
This earth will grow cold one day,
not like a block of ice
or a dead cloud even 
but like an empty walnut it will roll along
	  in pitch-black space . . . 
You must grieve for this right now
—you have to feel this sorrow now—
for the world must be loved this much
                               if you're going to say "I lived". . .

Go here to hear Chris Hedges reading "On Living"

Go here to hear an interview with Tom Hirons