The multiple troubles of man,
my brother, like slander and pain,
amaze you? Consider the heart
which holds them all
in strangeness, and doesn’t break.
Shmuel HaNagid, Hebrew poet of Muslim Spain (993-1056)
I am Yeats according to Auden.
For poetry accomplishes nothing:
it survives in the valley of its making . . .
I accomplish nothing but become
the poem that survives.
I am no righteous poem keeping score.
Hemingway was right,
The world breaks everyone:
Her rape. His torture. Their neglect.
All unloving shatters the glass
of our words learning to be poems.
Scars are ugly, but strong at the broken places.
I ran with that pack,
until I grew my own bootstraps and bared teeth,
trying not to save or scare all
who want to love me.
When she isn’t teaching the abundant virtues of the comma, writing about big hair and Elvis, and doing the Cha Cha, Kim Baker works to end violence against women. Kim performs in the annual Until the Violence Stops Festival Providence. Her poems have been published online and in print. Her most recent reasons to cha cha cha include fourth place in the Poetry Society of New Hampshire National Poetry Contest, This I Believe essay broadcast on NPR of Rhode Island, and first play stage-reading at the Culture*Park Play Marathon in New Bedford, Massachusetts about a middle-aged female survivor of childhood sexual assault.
