Revisiting the poems by Marie Howe, one of my favourite contemporary poets, I found these beautiful lines, “I’m having trouble with my breathing,//I’m still trying to make room for myself.”
Breath is fundamentally about space, space being made and unmade and having more or less access to space. A struggle to breathe, as well as the felt or perceived struggle to breathe, are an issue of space. Space for air, for movement and for transformation.
But what is space to us without safety? Or, at least, the illusion of safety that placates our nervous system, diffuses our worries and fears, lets us find rest.
For Marie Howe, poetry can provide a safe space. “Maybe the first poem was a lullaby. A woman saying to her child, the incantatory, ‘Everything is okay, everything is okay, go to sleep, go to sleep’”.
“Lullaby
Oh Mama, the monkeys never did come down the street.
I tried, but they never did come. There was nothing
in the back woods but woods.
The trees never moved an inch when we weren’t looking.
All that thumping we heard must have been rabbits rabbits.
No angels in the bushes.
No Indians underfoot. Just the boys hanging from their
home-made houses, waiting for us to come close enough
to catch.
That old beech I used to curl into never did know it.
When I carved my name there, it never winced.
It would have dropped me
like an apple for somebody else to bite, if it had apples.
You were right. You can tell me all you want to now.
That white sky
is just a lot of clouds moving together fast, not
an edge of paper that somebody might fold, and if
I’m having trouble with my breathing,
it’s that I’m still trying to make room for myself
in an envelope that’s not even there. I never did
learn the birds’ names, did I
but they weren’t singing to me, and the lilac blooming
in the far corner of the back yard, never bloomed,
I know it now, for anyone.”
Source: Lullaby by Marie Howe, from The Good Thief, Persea Books, 2007