It's Not That Bad #2: The 5 poems that I'm always returning to
Emotional-support poetry
Hello! Come on in! It’s my second newsletter and I’m still abuzz every time I get the ‘you’ve got a new subscriber’ email. So, thank you greatly for being here.
It’s currently the festive limbo - those nice slow days between Christmas and NYE - where time stands still and no one knows if it’s a Wednesday or a Sunday because it simply doesn’t matter. I had camembert for brunch today! Who can stop me!
For many of us, it’s been a weird few weeks, and I can’t say I’m really feeling the cheer. Just like the limbo my days are in, my mood is the same - not quite myself but not really sure why. Maybe it’s because I’m about to turn twenty-seven, and like every birthday, I’m full of reflection (more of those in next week’s newsletter). To try and feel more like ‘Chloe’, I’m re-reading a lot of my comfort books and poems rather than discovering new works. In my uncertainty I’m being drawn to nostalgia. My well handled copies of Heartburn, Three Women and Ghosts have become even more dogeared in this pursuit. And my emotional-support poems can be found in a folder on my phone, as I like to have them to hand at all times; so that if I’m on a walk or sitting on the bus I can easily get them in front of my eyeballs. If you follow me on Instagram, you’ll know I do a little series called ‘poems you should read today’. Think of today’s newsletter as a bumper edition of that…
1. To the Woman Crying Uncontrollably in the Next Stall By Kim Addonizio
If you ever woke in your dress at 4am ever
closed your legs to someone you loved opened
them for someone you didn’t moved against
a pillow in the dark stood miserably on a beach
seaweed clinging to your ankles paid
good money for a bad haircut backed away
from a mirror that wanted to kill you bled
into the back seat for lack of a tampon
if you swam across a river under rain sang
using a dildo for a microphone stayed up
to watch the moon eat the sun entire
ripped out the stitches in your heart
because why not if you think nothing &
no one can / listen I love you joy is coming
When journalists Dolly and Pandora read this poem on their podcast The High Low (R.I.P), it drove thousands of millennial women to tears. In 2019 it went viral on Twitter after a heartwarming story was shared - a woman names Agnes had read it to a grieving woman who was crying in the bathroom stall next to her: ‘I did the decent noise covering thing of ladies loos and read her this poem’.
Basically, I am not alone in loving it, and it has become pivotal in my life for a) introducing me to Kim’s work (What Is This Thing Called Love is a must read) and b) for helping me out in dark times.
To me, it’s about the shared experiences of women, the certainty of pain, and the certainty that most pain will fade. The last stanza became such a mantra to me that I got it tattooed on my inner arm (see below).
2. Two-Headed Calf, by Laura Gilpin
Tomorrow when the farm boys find this
freak of nature, they will wrap his body
in newspaper and carry him to the museum.
But tonight he is alive and in the north
field with his mother. It is a perfect
summer evening: the moon rising over
the orchard, the wind in the grass. And
as he stares into the sky, there are
twice as many stars as usual.
No matter how many times I read the ‘Two-Headed Calf’ it gives me shivers. Its simplicity makes it so much more complex - how so much is said with so little. How much of human nature is distilled. Laura has two collections titled The Hocus-Pocus of the Universe and the other is The Weight of a Soul, but this is by far her best known work.
3. Don’t Tell Anyone By Tony Hoagland
We had been married for six or seven years
when my wife, standing in the kitchen one afternoon, told me
that she screams underwater when she swims—
that, in fact, she has been screaming for years
into the blue chlorinated water of the community pool
where she does laps every other day.
Buttering her toast, not as if she had been
concealing anything,
not as if I should consider myself
personally the cause of her screaming,
nor as if we should perform an act of therapy
right that minute on the kitchen table,
—casually, she told me,
and I could see her turn her square face up
to take a gulp of oxygen,
then down again into the cold wet mask of the unconscious.
For all I know, maybe everyone is screaming
as they go through life, silently,
politely keeping the big secret
that it is not all fun
to be ripped by the crooked beak
of something called psychology,
to be dipped down
again and again into time;
that the truest, most intimate
pleasure you can sometimes find
is the wet kiss
of your own pain.
There goes Kath, at one pm, to swim her twenty-two laps
back and forth in the community pool;
—what discipline she has!
Twenty-two laps like twenty-two pages,
that will never be read by anyone.
Out of the many works Tony produced in his life, nothing has hit me quite like this line: ‘maybe everyone is screaming as they go through life, silently’. Isn’t that just truth, pure truth.
4. The committee Weighs In By Andrea Cohen
I tell my mother
I’ve won the Nobel Prize.
Again? she says. Which
discipline this time?
It’s a little game
we play: I pretend
I’m somebody, she
pretends she isn’t dead.
Brave! Funny! Heartbreaking! Clever! Andrea managed to sum up grief in such a delightful way - no easy feat. I come back to it it a lot, and even though I know what’s coming, it still makes me cry-laugh.
5. Wild Geese, By Mary Oliver
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
This masterpiece is a hug whenever I need it. It is a reminder of kindness, of how small our existence is but how it is not unimportant, and of how we are animals. To me, the first four lines are a comment on womanhood - on how we do not have to be, look or do as the patriarchy wants.
I hope you enjoyed these 5 poems, they aren’t necessarily my ‘favourites’ (I find it hard to have favourites), but they were all earth-shattering for me, in their own way, at different times. I hope any or all of them give you some comfort.
Let me know in the comments your go-to comfort poems…