The Darkness Around Us Is Deep – A Poem for Inauguration Eve – 2017

American Poet William Stafford (1914 – 1993)

A Ritual To Read To Each Other

If you don’t know the kind of person I am
and I don’t know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dyke.

And as elephants parade holding each elephant’s tail,
but if one wanders the circus won’t find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider–
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give–yes or no, or maybe–
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

William Stafford from The Way it Is – New and Selected Poems, Graywolf Press, 1998

William Stafford ( 1914 – 1993), greatly admired American poet, was a master of a way of writing some call plain spoken. I think he is, also, a master of knowing the dark and light inside the human heart. His wisdom has been a comfort to me for many years. It is especially a comfort at the beginning of an American presidency, unprecedented (not unpresidented) in my life time for the uncertainty and confusion it heralds. The divisiveness its incumbent champions in the twittersphere.

The comfort for me in Stafford’s poem, comes paradoxically, from how it discomforts me. Seems to describe what is happening politically, like an epidemic, around the world. I am comforted by recognizing Stafford’s insights of how our lives can go so badly astray. How the poem captures so well the Jungian concept of the shadow. Those undesirable and rejected parts of ourselves we project on to others. When the out cry of blame directed towards others reaches a fever pitch it is hard not to cry: shadow. The cry I hear in Stafford’s poem:

If you don’t know the kind of person I am
and I don’t know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

If I don’t own my own shadow and you don’t own yours, the war inside us spills out into wars outside us. We may miss the star of peace and find the star of war. That’s the message my friend , Laurens van der Post, told again and again. How I am chilled when I hear these lines of Stafford’s:

sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dyke.

If we don’t recognize the patterns we take on in childhood, a time when I think the shadow grabs hold in us, we can create so much damage to ourselves and others. I fear we may be entering a time when our collective and individual shadows will wreak havoc. How do we oppose this without simply adding our shadow to a darkness already too big? Not an easy thing to do. But as a good start I like what Stafford suggests we can do: Stay awake. Own our own shadows! The darkness around us is deep!