A Subway Poem

ruin, healing, and peace

As I sat on the subway, determined to avoid eye contact with any of my fellow riders, I noticed a poem framed on the wall.

I did a double take, rereading the poem and pulling my phone out to take a picture of it. Before long, it was my stop, so I stepped out into the busy streets of New York City.

My trips to New York tend to be filled with coffee and meals with various friends around Manhattan, and this one was no exception. I came across Denez Smith’s poem during one of the many subway rides I took that weekend and something about it resonated with me. I found myself thinking back to the poem as I traversed the city, walking through crowded streets of people and taking subway after subway.

A few days later, as I sat in a plane on the way back from Texas, my mind drifted back to the poem again. We had begun our descent from the skies; the cabin lights dimmed and my seat back upright. I pulled out my phone, and in its soft, blue glow, I reread the poem.

let ruin end here

A hopeful platitude, one righteous enough to show that you’re one of the good ones, but broad enough to avoid the logistics of liberation. A recognition of the vast and varied ruin that populates this world, of the ruin we pass by without a second thought on a daily basis.

Ruin. To wish for its end is to recognize its presence, the downward spiral into a pit of darkness. My mind drifts to a scholar I read about, a bright young woman whose studies of the Rape of Nanjing broke something in her. To a little Chinese boy, caught on film in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., being called racial epithets as he begs a group of boys not to hurt him; his father’s voice breaking as he wonders how to explain to his son what just happened to him.

let him find honey

where there was once a slaughter

Is this not what it means to live, to exist, in the United States of America? I think of Alok Menon, who said, “To live in this country is to attend a funeral with strangers.”

I think of Ta-Nehisi Coates, who wrote, “There is great pain in understanding that, without your consent, you are complicit in a great crime, in learning the whole game was rigged in your favor, that there are nations within your nation who have spent all of their collective lives in Trump years.” Not even to speak of the nations outside of my nation, whose plight is a prerequisite to my lifestyle.

How does one come to a reckoning with the slaughter upon which this country rests, that it continues to perpetuate?

I didn’t write the quote down, but in her book Integrated, Noliwe Rooks wrote a line that approximately said, “shooting is not the only way to kill a soul.” I think of Matthew Desmond’s Evicted and Poverty, By America, of the systemic massacre of the soul that my country perpetuates through its housing and economic policy.

What does it mean to find joy in such a context? One of my favorite memes is a series of screenshots of an interview of a white boy at the club who says,

let him enter the lion’s cage

& find a field of lilacs

What will it take for him to enter the lion’s cage in the first place?

bell hooks, in a lecture at the University of Washington, talked about the repression and lovelessness in young boys that inspired her to write multiple books on masculinity during the latter part of her career. “A genuine feminist politics,” hooks explained, “always brings us from bondage to freedom, from lovelessness to loving, mutual partnership is the foundation for love. Feminist thought and action create the conditions under which mutuality can be nurtured.”

Longtime relationship therapist Terry Real emphasized the crisis of male emotional unavailability in the Modern Love podcast episode, “Why Boys and Men Are Floundering.” In the podcast, he explains how men and boys are socialized into behaviors that avoid emotions rather than confront them. According to Real, it is through taking the risk of emotional vulnerability that true love and connection are nurtured, a risk that boys and men aren’t taking.

In Giovanni’s Room, James Baldwin writes about David, who discovers love with another man, Giovanni, only to abandon it to seek heteronormative comfort with his former girlfriend, Hella. In the end, David is unable to forget Giovanni and bring himself to love Hella as Giovanni slips into poverty and despair, eventually committing a crime that he is executed for. Hella leaves David and he ends up alone.

“We love who we love,” said James Baldwin in a dialogue with Maya Angelou, “and when we duck it, we die.”

let this be the healing

& if not let it be

An extension of the opening platitude, that from the ruin we can and will rebuild. Heal.

An important caveat, though. “If not” — the contingency plan, the plan B if our grand platitudes don’t pan out. It’s followed by a space, then another, then another. An exhale.

The space between “not” and “let”, just five or six characters wide on the page, holds multitudes. Broken promises, dashed hopes, mutilated dreams. The space feels more real, more vast than all of the words, phrases, and lines that have preceded it. It is the underbelly of hope, of our little prayer. As darkness is the right hand of light, our shining aspirations for a better future are predicated upon the shadows cast in this space.

What else is more universal than the experience of crossing this space? Of falling short; of devastation, big and small? To exist in an imperfect world is to inevitably find yourself enveloped in and constituted by its contradictions.

Through it all, we continue to exist.

An Instagram reel that I recently watched featured a monk dressed in orange robes. The interviewer asks him if he is happy, to which he responds, “Sometimes. And sometimes I’m not. Look, the reality is that you’re not going to be happy all the time. Above all else, what I seek is peace, and I would say I have found it.”

Is this not what the end of the poem is about? The peace we find in letting it be?

That, I think, is worth a little prayer.