A poem springing from contradictions or opposites can be satisfying in its succinctness. The haunted mixtures of Jacqueline Saphra’s “Songs and Stones” feel familiar as cadences of the everyday, yet more bearable. Her poem’s questions are human-size, not a tidal wave: How do we do this? How do we absorb all these elements with which we are continually confronted and move on? There are so many chords and notes to be struck, but how do we cry tears springing from so many sources? The poem ends on a note of mystery that feels comforting in its acknowledgment, despite all we do not know.
Songs and Stones
By Jacqueline Saphra
This head is heavy
with irreconcilable weights.
These worlds: how to balance
the scales, how to bear the ache.
Love stuns and buds in the bone,
terrors rattle the skull.
Sleep flickers and lifts the lids.
This neck is a buckled pillar.
From one eye, tears of rage;
from the other, tears of blessing.
These sobs are stones,
these sobs are songs.
How do I free these oppositions
from my throat?
I no longer know which one
Is making it so hard to swallow.
Naomi Shihab Nye is the 2019-21 Young People’s Poet Laureate of the Poetry Foundation, Chicago. Jacqueline Saphra is a poet and playwright living in London. She teaches at the Poetry School. Her latest book, “Dad, Remember You Are Dead,” was published in September by Nine Arches Press.
Illustration by R.O. Blechman
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