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Two Deep Breaths: Like This, For a Reason
Posted by Caitlin Dwyer Young
Geffrey Davis begins his poem “Like This, For a Reason” with a question: how do we show kindness when we鈥檙e hurting? How can we be gentle with our deep, old wounds? He wonders,
How to find the tender underbelly
of grief, to turn it down
onto its side, so you can hold it,
kiss it and rename it鈥
All of us have grief inside right now. In this COVID-19 pandemic, everyone has suffered some loss: a loved one sick or gone, a missed opportunity, a job lost or income reduced, friends isolated and distant. It鈥檚 been a hard time, with a lot of sadness.
What I love about Davis鈥 poem is that he asks us to be tender with ourselves. The poem centers on the speaker鈥檚 mother, and the core of the poem reveals memories of her, cooking in the kitchen, transforming meager ingredients into something delicious for her kids. She teaches them an important lesson: we feel pain / large like this for a reason. In the mother鈥檚 voice, loss becomes a teaching, an appreciation of the human capacity to feel deeply.
The mother鈥檚 injury is physical: her eye has been damaged in an act of domestic violence. But Davis approaches this injury with such tenderness, describing the beauty of his mother鈥檚 fading eyesight as shallow green water in Puget Sound, calm blue cornflowers, and yellow piano keys. Instead of feeling the expected rage or grief at the end of the poem, we feel instead a kind of wonder. Davis has found the 鈥渢ender underbelly鈥 of tragedy and held it close. He doesn鈥檛 deny the hurt or harm, but loves it until it transforms.
Reading this poem from , I wonder how we all can 鈥渒iss and rename鈥 our grief in this season. How can we too show kindness to ourselves and to our losses. How we can hold each other in tenderness. In that spirit, enjoy “Like This, For a Reason.”
Like This, For a Reason
How to find the tender underbelly
of grief, to turn it down
onto its side, so you can hold it,
kiss it and rename it:
my mother taught this. The lost dog
became patience. And finding it
dead along the road meant go ahead and cry now.
But then, with her fingers spread
against our sobbing chests, we feel pain
large like this for a reason.
Each month, the money thinned
and she stood alone in the kitchen
humming the last bit of our food
into songs of tomorrow鈥
Even her cataracted eye, the one
my father punched years ago,
setting the unhurried cloud into motion,
we鈥檝e since claimed as victory.
Though, before the surgery,
she never mentioned an absence of color 鈥
the hues fading slowly enough
to manage the heart鈥檚 break. Everything鈥檚 so soft,
she鈥檇 say, and meant it: the sharp dive of green
growing shallower in the Sound,
cornflower blue calming itself
shade by shade,
the keys of yellow muted to a familiar
flatness she called spring.
Geffrey Davis is the author of two full-length collections: (BOA Editions, 2019), winner of the from the Academy of American Poets, and 鈥(BOA Editions, 2014), winner of the. He also co-wrote the chapbook (URB Books, 2016) with LA-based poet and friend . His poems have appeared in Crazyhorse, New England Review, 鈥鈥婽he New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, PBS NewsHour, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. Originally raised by the Pacific Northwest, Davis lives with his family in the Ozarks on the traditional lands of the Osage, Caddo, and Quapaw people.