12/11/2023
Find the Poets
I arrived in a foreign land yesterday,
a land that has seen troubles,
(who hasn’t, you might say?)
This land
with its scrubbed white houses
and blue seas, where everything was born,
and now, everything seems as if it could vanish.
I wanted to find out the truth
about how a great land like this
could allow ancient columns to crumble
and organ grinders to disappear.
Find the poets, my friend said.
If you want to know the truth, find the poets.
But friend, where do I find the poets?
In the soccer fields,
at the sea shore,
in the bars drinking?
Where do the poets live these days,
and what do they sing about?
I looked for them in the streets of Athens,
at the flea market and by the train station,
I thought one of them might have sold me a pair of sandals.
But he did not speak to me of poetry,
only of his struggles, of how his house was taken from him
along with his shiny dreams of the future,
of all the dangers his children must now be brave enough to face.
Find the poets, my friend said.
They will not speak of the things you and I speak about.
They will not speak of economic integration
or fiscal consolidation.
They could not tell you anything about the burden of adjustment.
But they could sit you down
and tell you how poems are born in silence
and sometimes, in moments of great noise,
of how they arrive like the rain,
unexpectedly cracking open the sky.
They will talk of love, of course,
as if it were the only thing that mattered,
about chestnut trees and mountain tops,
and how much they miss their dead fathers.
They will talk as they have been talking
for centuries, about holding the throat of life,
till all the sunsets and lies are choked out,
till only the bones of truth remain.
The poets, my friend, are where they have always been—
living in paper houses without countries,
along rivers and in forests that are disappearing.
And while you and I go on with life
remembering and forgetting,
the poets remain: singing, singing.
tishani doshi
