Of martyrs, narrative, meaning, truth, and the craft of writing

Martyrs of the UCA in El Salvador

Today is an anniversary that marks murder and horror and the worst of U.S. imperial reach. On Nov. 16, 1989, six Jesuit priests and a mother and daughter who had taken refuge from war on the campus of San Salvador's Central America University were gunned down by soldiers funded, armed, and trained by the United States. They were good men, these priests, brilliant scholars, courageous in the role they took on during their country's civil war, fiercely dedicated to the poor who were struggling in the face of enormous odds for their liberation from decades of US-supported dictatorship.

I mention this because this story, the story of Central America during the years of the liberation struggles, was the work of my life - for nearly 25 years. I used to write the stories.

"Poetry's true perception..." - or memoir's

I struggle through memoir and poems these days. The memoir is in a hard place, the diminishment and long dying of my mother - an extraordinary journey we shared together. It opens up a raw, tender place - vulnerable, bursting with compassion and love...

And then I just miss her.

Since I started this writing project I also started writing poetry. That surprised me at first, now it doesn't at all. Now I begin to understand it.

What was freed up in the journey, what was let go, and then what the fierce concentration on that narrative opened even more, has freed up the place where poems are apparently born - at least, it appears, for me.

A poet? Really?

I find this terrifying - and moving. Poems published?

I remember being young and falling in love with Frost, Whitman, Dickinson, and wondering if I could ever be a poet. I scribbled horrible poetry when young (except for one brief verse in my teen years that I hope will be an intro page for a collection some day). Now in these later years, something in life turned me back to poetry like a thirsty wanderer in the desert of this world - you know, I can't possibly drink enough.

Memoir is laden

More laden than I thought it would be. I mean, digging into the narratives that made our lives what they are, and after more than six decades of it, you wonder why you wanted to stir all that up again.

Where the story took place...

And yet, there lies the story. What I keep coming to as I dig and mine and create my jewels out of deeply buried gems (how's that for metaphor?!) is that these stories never go away. Come to them fully again and they are as fresh as ever, as real as ever. Which means they are also still there to be learned from, to find wisdom in, (never end a sentence or phrase with a preposition). Lower your cup into the well, see how the water tastes after all these years.

Opening the Gates...

I've been reading Jane Hirshfield's remarkable book of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry. She is one of my favorite poets and the Buddhist spirituality that lies beneath so much of her work really resonates for me right now.

I don't claim to be a poet, and yet I have written poetry mostly to help open some of my own gates, to make me a better writer. There is something writing poetry does to you, if you are willing to plumb the depths, go to the depths fearlessly, or, if with fear, bravely, to see what you find there. The poetry that changes everything is the poetry that does what Buddhism invites us to do: it looks deeply. And, as Thich Nhat Hanh has written, "Looking deeply requires courage."

The poet must have courage.