Finding Words When We Have None

When I was fifteen, I crafted a collage for my bedroom wall. Pictures cut from magazines, words trimmed carefully, flimsy edges of thin paper glued carefully onto cardboard and hung above my desk. Classic teenage creation: part collection of inspiration, part declaration of identity.

In the center of the collage were lines of poetry I clipped from a journal. I liked them right away; I knew I wanted the lines in the middle.

To live in this world,

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;

to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it
go,
to let it go.

I trimmed away the poet’s name without thinking.

. . .

Twenty years later, I stood next to a NICU isolette. Through a plastic window I held the tiny hand of my daughter, dying from a brain hemorrhage, complications from her premature birth.

Nothing had prepared me for that moment. I had no words. (Or so I thought.)

But the poem came to my lips. A sudden, unbidden memory. I spoke it over my child and the plastic box that held her. A benediction for a baby I would never raise.

To live in this world,

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;

to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it
go,
to let it go.

I spoke the words as salt tears streamed into my mouth and hot mucus poured out of my nose. I did not move my hand to wipe my face. Staring at death stripped away everything unessential—comfort, cleanliness, concern for personal appearance or what anyone else thought.

But the poet’s words remained.

. . .

Only after I had read Mary Oliver as a young adult did I discover my favorite lines were hers.

Procrastinating from paper-writing during graduate school, wandering library stacks to find something easier and more delightful than coursework, I pulled a book off the shelves and started to read, only to slip into an unexpected moment of connection: the delight of resonance, the rightness of fit, the dawning of finding what was already known.

I came to savor her poems, carrying them one by one through changing seasons. Nature, noticing, emotion, observance—her words pulled me out of my narrow world into wider views.

By each poem’s end, I felt myself sitting with her, looking outside, turning inside, understanding both better. I wanted more of this in the middle of my life — in every sense. In the middle of my days, to enter the woods of a poem and leave quieter. In the middle of my years, to approach mid-life with the poet’s humble grace. In the middle of my being, to wrap my core with poetry and psalm.

. . .

A poem can only be an offering. It remains human, bounded, incomplete.

In a moment of death, a poem came to me. But even the blessing (if I could call it that) of finding words to speak into suffering could not polish agony into something smooth or easier to hold.

Even as I finished speaking the words over my daughter Abigail, a nurse rushed in behind me. “You need to come quickly. We have to make a decision about Margaret. She’s coding.”

So I turned from one dying daughter to another, from one NICU room to the next, from twin to twin. An hour later, Margaret died in my arms. The next day, her sister did the same.

I had no words left. Or so I thought.

In the months and years that followed, I returned to Oliver’s poem “In Blackwater Woods.” Why had those words come to me at the moment of death? Why poetry instead of Scripture—or prayer?

At the worst moment beyond words, another slipped in to speak what I could not.

As I wrote this essay, I typed Mary Oliver’s lines from memory. Even before I knew who wrote the words, why or how, they spoke to me as true.

I wanted them in the middle of my life.

. . .

I came to the library today, not knowing that Mary Oliver had died. I discovered that I was sitting near the poetry section when a teacher brought her students and started pulling out books to fill their arms, speaking slowly and gently.

“This is Emily Dickinson. She’s very popular. This is Walt Whitman. Lots of people like his poems.”

I smiled, the secret knowing of eavesdroppers.

But when the students began to ask questions, halting, searching for words, I realized why the teacher spoke so carefully. They were adults learning English, practicing a new language.

Later I watched them walk across the parking lot, laughing as winter wind whipped their hair, each clutching a stack of books to her chest.

Poetry does this: carries treasure, stands against bitter wind, delights in company, discovers language for what is known and what is new. Without flinching, it names the beauty and the horror in the center of life, sears something true onto the page, and offers it to another.

I loved Mary Oliver before I knew her, and I knew her truth before I loved her, and poetry carved out places within me I could not have brought to prayer without the poet going first. My own life has depended on these truths, held against my own bones, and with a poem’s gentle prompt, let go.

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