Happy 2024, everyone. 2023 was a lot, wasn’t it? 2024 seems like it’s going to be a lot too, not least because of the US elections coming up…yikes.
I spent a lot of time this past year both reading the news and actively avoiding reading the news: it was all just so goddamned sad. Torture, death, abuse…you name it, it happened, and was often widespread (and that’s just the shortlist). Knowing all this, how are the rest of us supposed to go on living as if the world weren’t on fire?
All I can do is offer up useless prayers that somehow the people who end up coming out on the other side of this shit show experience some kind of transcendence — that going through hell at the very least gifts them with some extra clarity and the kind of raw fortitude that none of us want to earn for ourselves.
And when I think about that hope, I think about this poem that I’ve returned to over and over (from the book Like a Beggar, which I highly recommend). I hope you enjoy it like I do:
Jazz, by Ellen Bass
Today I’m thinking about this child’s life —
the rags of it, the ragged waves of it, the vaporous
fumes of it, the split tree, stomped out spark,
the one-eyed, peg-legged pirate of it, the over-ripened
kissed to bruises fruit, the exposed
negative, the burned out bulb marquee. And then
I start thinking maybe there’s hope.
Maybe her life could be like jazz
that starts out with a simple melody,
nothing complicated, nothing jittery or twisted,
and then breaks off, kisses it, waves goodbye,
ripens the notes, tears the tune to rags,
strips it, pokes out an eye, burns it,
sends it up in smoky wreaths,
reaches inside and steals the honey,
bees streaming in black ribbons from the hive,
and when it seems as though it’s long gone, ashes and bone,
when it’s strung out, wrung out, blasted
with a wrecking ball, bombed out, concrete dust,
it slides over and spirals up in one high thin note
stretched so far you can’t tell if the ache
is bitter or sweet, it returns
to the melody, rinsed pure and clean of the past,
you almost can’t bear it, the deliverance,
the song come home.