Tolerating the Intolerable with Poetry

a writing prompt for you

Welcome to Writing in Company. This is a community for you, whatever your experience with writing. It’s an invitation to write about what matters—grief, gratitude, grace, and more. In an off-kilter world, using our words can help us stay centered and move toward healing and wholeness. Writing in company with others saved me once. Let’s keep writing now, alone and together, and trust our words to help us see and say what matters.

It’s not easy out there, friends.

Natural disasters continue to ignore political optics. In my part of North Carolina, wildfires are burning the debris left from the hurricane that blew through here six months ago, while FEMA and NOAA are losing the funding, expertise, and preparedness needed for the next disasters. Which could be anywhere.

Museums, libraries, universities, and public media are all devalued and under threat of defunding. What will be next?

Programs that save lives are disappearing. Foreign students and workers who are here legally are also disappearing off the streets of our cities and towns. Jobs that matter are being eliminated. For those who’ve been following the ups and downs, my sister, like every other employee with USAID, finally received her reduction in force notice last week. (I typed several sentences after that one, and deleted each one in turn, leaving just the period at the end of that stupid sentence.)

In the meantime, all the regular irregular losses continue to rupture our days. A friend starts chemo. Another calls hospice. A hard anniversary finds us unexpectedly weeping. How do we tolerate what is intolerable? How do you?

I’m not telling you anything about the state of things you likely don’t already know. What I want to know is: How are you handling it, living with it, metabolizing it, even transforming it into action, when it seems at first too awful to process?

• Are you keeping current on news, and taking thoughtful steps to respond?Rationing your time online? Staying connected locally?

• Are you scrolling towns in France that sell crumbling homes for $1, wondering if your passport is up to date? Planning trips with people you love?

• Are you figuring out how to stay asleep when needed, and nurturing your creativity to stay awake, otherwise?

• Are you numbing yourself with NCAA basketball and Netflix’s White Lotus? (For Duke fans like me, these two raise conflicting feelings.)

• Are you exploring sudden wild ideas about new possibilities? Or just finding ways to convince yourself to crawl out of bed? (Good coffee. Dog. A new library book.)

• Are you noticing beauty where it surprises? Like the way the unkempt front yard looks like an English meadow full of wildflowers, and the pink dogwood that split in the wind is still blooming?

I’m doing some of all of that, off and on.

I know from past trauma and healing—a long time in coming—that there are methods and resources large and small, both within ourselves and outside our doing, to accept the unacceptable, forgive the unforgivable, and even love the unlovable. Faith, intentional practices, wise mentors, meaningful work, time, creativity, and community all come to mind.

Tolerating the intolerable seems harder right now. The scale and the speed of the assault magnifies its impact, and diminishes our imagination for response.

As always, poetry might be part of the answer. April is National Poetry Month, just in time to remind us that language can make the impossible possible.

In an interview with The Chicago Review of Books, poet Joy Harjo says:

Poetry holds a crucial role in society. Poetry can hold, in a very small container sometimes, what nothing else can hold. Poetry can hold grief so immense that there’s nothing else [that] can contain it; poetry can hold stories that are dense or unspeakable; poetry can hold joy and awe; poetry can hold the contradictory parts of ourselves, the contradictory parts of the country. Sometimes three or four little lines can hold a whole lifetime.

Poetry gives us a way to speak the unspeakable, endure the unendurable, bear the unbearable, and believe the unbelievable, all without permitting the impermissible.

I’ll be sharing poetry prompts every week this month—poems that might help us tolerate the intolerable as we read (and write in response!) I invite you to share in the comments your own discoveries that are helping you navigate these days.

a writing prompt

Read the poem below from Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer.¹

Notice a word, a line, a question, or an image from the poem that jumps out at you, and start writing there.

Keep your pen moving, and see where your words take you.

Even in a Time of Intolerance 
  
“We all have a part in shifting the story.”  
                  —Joy Harjo, 23rd US Poet Laureate 
  
There is, in an overfull classroom, 
a woman teaching not only history, 
but compassion. There’s a barista 
making hearts in the foam 
of every cappuccino she serves. 
There’s man helping another man 
on crutches as he struggles to cross 
the icy street. There’s a library room full of women 
chanting about praying for their enemy. 
There are students raising money 
to help those with breast cancer and AIDS. 
Two girls are laughing for the joy of laughing 
’til their faces are tear-streaked 
and their ribs and bellies are sore. 
There’s a poet who pours courage and music 
into every word she shares with the world. 
And another woman hears those words 
and thinks, “Me. That poet is talking to me.” 
This is how we change the world one kind act, 
one true word, one long laugh at a time. Because 
now, that woman is ablaze with wondering: 
What is my part in shifting the story? 
 
—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
  

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Join in the conversation with others in the comments. Tell me what you think about the prompt, or where your writing takes you.

Know someone who might enjoy this prompt or others? Please share!

Each week I share some ideas and a writing prompt, meant to be jumping-off points. Use the prompts however you like—to journal, to draft a writing project, as prayer ideas, or for another creative endeavor. If this one doesn’t resonate, look back through the archive for more. Clicking the heart to like this post helps keep my writing prompts visible and my own writer’s heart grateful.

Photo by Laura Johnston on Unsplash

1. She’s also on Substack here: Emerging Form