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Editor’s Note: The arts are a significant thread in the fabric of Rockland County. They inspire, enrich, and chronicle our lives. They also play a role in our economic well-being; theater, writing, dance, crafts draw us to spaces. They invite strangers to share in our bounty. They are an indelible contribution. Welcome again, Christine Potter, a poet, to RCBJ.
Poetry In Hard Times: A Certain Slant of Light
By Christine Potter
I started Grist for the Mill, this local poetry column, almost a year ago. The world seemed dark then. It still seems dark now. I’d like some relief! I keep coming back to the Martin Luther King Jr. quote about that: “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that.” Poems are my favorite source of light: carbon neutral, portable, easy to share. As a remedy for hard times, they are without peer: awe-inspiring as Dickinson’s wintry “slant of light” or cozy as William Blake’s children playing in the sun in Songs of Innocence.
So I wrote to some of the Rockland County poets we’ve profiled this year and asked them a question: how do you deal with this darkness? I asked for both advice and poems to help us all buck up a little. Because both Rockland County and the poets who live in it are amazing, everyone got right back to me. Read and be comforted.
Mary Lou Buschi says the horrors in the news initially feel like “a gut-punch of disgust” to her. But after thinking about it, she concludes that “there is always suffering. There is always a group that feels the times are ‘better’ at the expense of others. Yet, even at our worst, great art and music emerge—work that challenges us and makes us think.”
Mary Lou considers herself a “blue collar poet;” she sees her writing as a kind of skilled labor—difficult and precise. I am grateful for the work she put into this painful but ultimately uplifting poem she offers us as balm.
Sonnet Looking Back (Hole in Your Head 1/6/2025)
Monsignor turned the altar into a round stage.
Covered the floors with a magenta and scarlet rug.
He left the pillars, stained-glass procession—The Agony
and The Ecstasy, and the confessionals, those dark rooms
where men hide behind a curtain listening to trembling women,
only to whisper into the naked ear, Three Hail Marys.
The sacristy full of blood and flesh, candles dissolving
in cylindrical glass tubes, donation boxes full.
The last time I was in that arena—
I listened to a soloist hit high notes, Ave Maria.
Quaking beneath my skirt, my right leg wouldn’t quiet.
Her casket just inches away. The darkness surrounds us,
I said to my dead mother. When I return from a trip
my autocorrect types, I am hope, for I am home—
and I am sick. My love replies, You are America.
This is a profound and beautiful lament. Like Emily Dickinson and her “seal despair,” the speaker in this poem is taking a risk. The religion of her youth has failed her, “donation boxes full.” Her mother has died. When her autocorrected text conflates “hope” and “home,” and it sickens her, her love says “you are America.” This American sonnet ends in deep sorrow but also hope: a perfect piece for right now.
I’ll admit sometimes I lose my grasp on the literary and resort to escapist TV. For me, that’s baking competitions. Mary Lou has non-poetic advice, too: pay attention to “the specifics of everyday life,” she says. She also indulges in “procedural shows—the kind with endless exposition, where a team has to save the world yet again, explaining everything they’re about to do before they do it. That’s my kind of mindless escape—something like Blindspot.”
Poet/performer/songwriter Wally Glickman doesn’t mince words about the current storm clouds. The heck with telling it slant! He writes directly and passionately “to express my revulsion” he says, and gets relief by going out to read his work. The community at readings lifts him up, he tells me, emphasizing how important he thinks all community is just now.
Also, he watches Curb Your Enthusiasm, which does not surprise me one bit. Go see Wally’s next reading (he performs often). There’s certainly a bit of Larry David in there. He offers us solace in this poem.
Autumn Chaos
That pure blue scope of sky is marred
by broken branches, bent and crooked,
gnarled with boles, twisted, charred.
And the leaves! My God, just look at…
Leaves of every shape and tone
that settled wherever they got blown,
and lie just strewn across the ground,
to reds and yellows on the tree
that makes no pattern I can see.
If there’s a plan, it’s sure well hidden.
Come on God, you must be kiddin.
Better get your pruning shears,
this isn’t worthy of… and yet…
It’s blurry now. My eyes are wet,
and hey, my shirt is drenched with tears.
Wally writes metrical, formal verse. He’s also very funny. One of the sweetest things about his work is how gently it nudges and winks. I love that this poem takes on one of the hoariest clichés in all of literature—autumnal grief—gives it a nice, firm goose, making it new. And then he makes you cry anyway!
It’s all in the second stanza’s first couplet: “well hidden” rhymed with “Come on God, you must be kiddin.” That and the set-up, the carefully drawn imagery of the first stanza.. This poem is not just a lament but a prayer; the tears sneak up right after the giggle, on both narrator and reader. And let us hope on God also.
Like Mary Lou Buschi, poet and healer Kelly Jo Lillian thinks it’s important to focus on the physical world in front of you, citing Natalie Goldberg’s useful book Writing Down the Bones. She recommends purchasing a notebook with the silliest cover imaginable and writing in it—by hand, for the physical connection. I’m keyboard dependent, but I see how that makes sense.
Kelly Jo on our current darkness: “this cumulative heaviness is real, and it deserves space. We can’t work through intense emotions if we can’t relate to them. Instead of shaming or ignoring them, we lean in as writers. What if we move the pen with the feelings, carving out space not to battle on the internet but to see what lives inside?”
Kelly Jo’s non-poetry remedy is dance and ritual. When she’s overwhelmed, she says she lights a candle, cues up some good music, and dances. She also creates rituals around simple, natural things like “walking towards water, or calling in an element that grounds me.”
I’m honored to say that she trusted us with a very new poem for this column. It came from a writing prompt she received at a retreat that focused around grief and the holy. She was given the title to write to.
This Is How We Loved
This is How we loved….
Alone at midnight.
My invisible kisses swept through your mind like waking up turtles in the sand.
in your eyes a likeness to mine
Steady affirming eyes.
This is how we loved.
No, not love like seashells and the crab
but love like toes on the lap
love like tiny anchors around my waist that lead me back into the tar deep within
your chest.
A love lost once.
A Never Ever After.
You held me deep into the horizon.
My eyes on your darkness like groves through tunnels
we swept and sang until the ocean foam got sandy.
This love, like teddy bears eyes holding hope in department stores
waiting for open arms to take them home and make them a little bed next to the big
bed you sleep in.
Ready to be picked up.
This is how we loved.
Like wind flames damaged through bottomless bellies.
I am in the empty box wondering which crack breaks open to the last echo chamber to life.
Which lap shall I lie on when I only belong on yours?
This love is subtle and saddled.
I open my thighs and enter my own channels.
This is how we love.
I love the turtle simile in her first stanza, and all the seashore imagery. And the line “we swept and sang until the ocean foam got sandy.” I wish my early drafts came out like that!
The specific, concrete details in this are centering and grounding. The retreat Kelly Jo went on was also about how to “call in” more love. I’m grateful that she gave us such specific instruction in these tough times. May it call in peace for us all!
Piermont poet William Huhn reminded me of a William Carlos Williams quote that speaks precisely to the current situation, “It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.”
Huhn recommends the act of writing as a remedy for the current darkness: “I would say the unwritten page, as it fills in, blossoms into a realm where the world news falls away, good and bad. The news is rendered unhurtful or dreamified because its causes become more profoundly understood, even in a poem seemingly not about current events. Against the joys and comfort of the human spirit that poetry taps into, the horrors of the world tend to fall into perspective.”
I couldn’t agree more. In my own practice, getting into the flow of creating a poem remedies any pain I might be feeling personally—and if I am successful, it makes something sweet out of something bitter.
He sent us this, and it is extraordinary:
I Let
I let my body break apart
felt it fall asunder
expand accelerate
The stars had won the match
It was all very natural
a miracle no less
free of a life
few master
not I one of these
but I dreamt of living children
who live through this day
We go to church ‘twixt
the birds of the air
All of us are saved
Oh, how I love that close! It made me do something that my college poet friends used to call Crenner Eyes. Let me explain: my undergrad faculty advisor was a good and patient poet named James Crenner. (Was and is! He’s still very much alive and active.) He loved reading poems aloud. In workshop with us, often used Robert Bly as a model. Reading one of Bly’s concluding lines, he’d look up from the book and pop his eyes out of focus as the poem cast its spell. “I Let” has that kind of power. I’m still staring into the middle distance, comforted, “dreamified.” Thank you, William.
It feels like the right thing to let Rockland County’s poet laureate, Juan Pable Mobili, bear the last bit of light. Here’s what he does to get through these times: “Working on my poems is my main and necessary practice, whether it’s writing a new draft, revising a poem not-there-yet, or deciding which ones are ready to meet editors… I also watch staying connected to people I love, especially my wife. After forty-two years of marriage, I’d be a fool not to drink from that well. I also learned that being faithful to the ‘mundane’ (doing dishes, separating what I recycle, and folding laundry mindfully) offers solace and focus.” He shared two poems with us.
Dirt
I’m not looking for explanations,
but poems to make the world
hospitable,
giving dirt another chance,
write how come dust is sacred,
and lint so humble.
Courage
I celebrate those times a bright ember
pulsated at the center of a great risk,
a mother betting her body
for the sake of her child’s birth,
mothers facing armies for the sake
of their grown daughters and sons,
and Saint Jerome removing
a thorn from the paw of the lion
that entered the monastery,
while every monk fled.
(First published by Impspired, 2023)
Poetry is boiling-down of things to their essence, concentrating things, and Mobili does that here. We need both dirt and courage. I love the first stanza in “Dirt.” Maybe that’s what I’m trying to do with the column this month, “make the world hospitable.”
And “Courage” is even more concentrated! The opening image is about light, isn’t it? A “bright ember.” Then comes the courage and strength of mothers and women—and Saint Jerome! I want to remember the poem’s excellent and heartening advice: courage is removing the pain from the beast that is about to eat you! So we’re back to Martin Luther King: only light can drive out darkness.
Mobili says he tries to remain positive: “being deliberate about not polluting my mind with worrying helps quite a bit, but I’m far from a magic formula. I am not always on the winning side of my struggle with the ‘Constitution deficit disorder’ I experience these days in this country, nor can I avoid remembering I come from another country that starved from its complete absence, for years.” Yes.
It is a gift to have all this wisdom for our journey. I usually end these columns with a poem of my own. Here’s one that ran in Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, and the kind editor there, Christine Klocek-Lim, nominated it for Best of the Net. I hope it helps:
Why I Keep Crying
It used to be America was basic to my heart as
a school bus ride home and whatever joyously
new season it was: spring crocheting hot green
fussiness everywhere, winter afternoons gone
dark fast in an important-sounding clatter of my
mother at the stove, pulling open the broiler for
lamb chops, everyone’s father home from the
Army full of improbable war stories. We had all
been told not to shout out the countdown along
with the TV when our first astronaut blasted off.
But in the peanut butter and tuna salad-scented
air of our new primary school’s all-purpose room,
we did it anyway. So adults shushed us. Adults
said don’t run, walk! Adults yelled that we’d get
sweaty. But running grew wings out of your back.
It blew to bits how still you’d had to hold all day.
And I was such an American as a child, belting
God Bless America on the swings, embarrassing
my mother. I wanted all the pieces of America,
wanted to collect the whole set. I loved pledging
allegiance. I did it without thinking, like saying
The Lord’s Prayer—but I understood The Pledge.
I did. America was the break-your-leg trampoline
I wished my parents would buy me, to launch me
over and over until all I could do was laugh and
lie on my back, looking up at the sky. That’s why.
May we all be laughing together after a good old bounce on the trampoline soon. See you in November.
