Of Poetry and All the Rest

At a conference once, I got to pose a question to Anne Lamott. It was a question about writing, about art. I asked if she thought art could do anything. Could art motivate people to change? Could art inspire people? Should it be created with the intention of doing either of these things? Was it worth creating at all if it couldn't do either of these things? She was not the first artist I'd ever posed this question to; the first artist was a Welsh poet, who was taken aback at my question, and insisted that she would never "presume" to inspire anyone. Huff.

Anne Lamott apparently thought the question deserving of more than abrupt dismissal. She answered that she thought art was the thing that shone through the cracks of the broken world; art was the light beyond the dark. Art provided hope in desperate times.

I think, then, that God cannot be unlike poetry. Like poetry, but that where poetry only approaches, only mimics, God is and will do.

When I consider that one man can kill thirty other human beings in a morning, I find myself skidding across the burnt and blackened shell of our world, frantically looking for the cracks; looking for the narrow, faintly lit crevices; gasping at the drips of water slipping through the rock. When I find the droplets, I suck at them. When I see the cracks, I scratch at them with my fingernails. I cry,
please let me just touch your hem,
please leave us just with a little light,
please, please,
we take it all back, we take it all back, we take it all back.
Please, please,
our throats are parched.