You Can't Eat a Poem

an homage to our words and why they matter (long after our rose-colored glasses have broken)

I.

I once wrote a children’s story about the power of words.

I was a bright-eyed education major, and I couldn’t imagine anything more meaningful than drilling the importance of language into a room full of kids. The story still sits in my desk drawer; that’s not the interesting part of this tale. What is of interest is the way it came about, and why, because to understand that is to understand how a death and a poem a decade later could throw me into an existential (and vocational) crisis. 

Here’s how it went: 

My campus was on the coast of Maine and so one day, I took myself down to the ocean to feel the cold sand connect with my bare skin and see what came of it. The piping plovers were running criss-cross in the surf and the sky was ominous and the water had taken on the color of spectacular gray eyes and I—I felt some sort of turbulence rising within me. I walked alone across an exposed sandbar right to its very tip and I stood there, trying to make tangible that which was swirling all around me and inside me. Some might have called it a “thin space,” but back then I didn’t have that sort of terminology and all I knew was that it was as real as real could be, but that it was also otherworldly—I had a heightened awareness of forces playing wildly beyond my perception of space and time. I knew if I could only wrestle whatever it was into two dimensions, I could contain it. I could share it. I could transport this fantastic abstract essence into the hands of others who were dying to know life beyond what they were presently living. 

When I felt the waves wash up around my ankles, I looked down, startled. I hadn’t even noticed the tide creeping in, so captivated was I by this reality apart from my earthly body; gravity and my grumbling stomach and the sub-freezing temperatures of the water had been there all along, but I’d been free of them for a while. 

I was buoyant. I ran back along the rapidly shrinking sandbar, up the hill and onto the street, and all the way back to my dorm room. Breathless, I sat down on my bunk bed and fought with all my might to wrangle that experience into words that could lie flat on a page. Well into the night, I looked up and around and realized I had forgotten to eat. The dining hall was closed. The campus was asleep. And in my hands, there was a rough draft—and it seemed to be pulsating with holiness.

II.

I came by this fascination with words honestly.

When I was a child, my mother would occasionally take my sister and me to the local Movie Gallery, where we would run up and down the aisles pulling colorful movie jackets from the shelves, begging her to let us watch all manners of pish. On Fridays there was a five-for-five deal, where you could rent five DVDs for five dollars, so we often walked out with Honey, I Shrunk the Kids or—my favorite—Flubber, but my mother also insisted on exposing us to the classics. Our weekend movie nights often involved singing along to Oklahoma!, crying over Rolf joining the Nazis in The Sound of Music, or mistaking Hoosiers for the word ‘hooligans’ and assuming it’d be about a bunch of boys in a lot of trouble.  

But the movie that indelibly marked me was the Dead Poets Society. I remember grumbling to my mother that it sounded boring and weird, remember seeing the opening credits with those 1989 visuals and rolling my eyes. But when Robin Williams leaned into that circle of boys staring at the photos of the ones who’d gone before them and whispered, “Carpe diem,” I swear I stopped breathing. And as he crouched among them later in the classroom and said, “Medicine, law, business, engineering; these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love; these are what we stay alive for!”—that’s the moment language became synonymous in my mind with the most important thing we could ever give the world. 

III.

I lived in that reality until three years ago, when I found myself sitting beside my mother-in-law while she lay in a hospital bed in her living room.

I remember the morning perfectly: water was sliding down the windows in drab little droplets, and coffee was percolating on the counter. The coffee pot kept making crackles and pops that gave me comfort, and I felt simultaneously grateful for that and ashamed; it didn’t seem right to let my grief be so easily assuaged by something as nominal as caffeine. 

It was odd for me to have her to myself. Usually everyone was around: sitting by her bed, changing the sheets, whispering in the corner with the home nurse. But on that morning, at least in my memory now, it was as though everyone else had evaporated and so had the rest of the world, and it was just her, lying in the liminal space between earth and heaven, and me, gazing at her face, her hair, her hands, wondering how reality had taken such a violent turn. 

We are separated from death by only a whisper’s width, I thought to myself. 

I thought about the brilliance of her life: the four children she’d raised and the home she had nurtured, yes, but also the stories she had shared when it was just her and me, like how she would spend entire afternoons of her childhood biking around town with her best friend, or the way her father had picked her some wild lake flowers and scooped her into his arms the last time they went boating together. I pictured her covered in freckles, running around barefoot, laughing wildly with the squawking gulls in the midcoast town where she grew up. 

The juxtaposition between those vibrant images and the woman I was sitting beside now was so harsh it nearly doubled me over. The existential boogeyman lurked at the fringes of my mind, speaking my terrible fears aloud: If she’s going to die and so are you, then what’s the point of anything? 

I had once believed words and ideas could change the world. But at that moment, I had to admit that I couldn’t say anything to stop the steam train of death that was lumbering down the tracks. Poetry, beauty, romance, love—they were all fine for the young, for the healthy, for the hopeful. But for the dying? In the words of the author of Ecclesiastes, “Vanity of vanities! All is vanity” (Ecclesiastes 1:2).

IV. 

Recently, contemporary poet David Gate shared a poem on Instagram called War is the Poetry Killer.

It was about his struggle to write anything of value in response to the Israel-Palestine conflict. His final lines stopped me mid-scroll: 

all my words are ploys of vanity

the children of Rafah

cannot eat a poem

Months after reading it, I am still haunted by his words. The children of Rafah/cannot eat a poem. Those lines come to me as I curl my hand around the pen in the dark of night, as I toy with ideas while brushing my teeth, as I jot phrases on the backs of receipts and napkins lest they get away. Something like despair rises in this poet’s throat every time his words come to mind; they are reverberations of the same doubt that’s plagued me since the morning I sat with my mother-in-law. 

Though Gate grapples with the horrors of war and I with mortality on a smaller scale, at the heart of our torment is the same question:

When we are but a whisper’s-width away from death, what good can words really do? 

When basic needs, such as food or shelter, a healthy body or sense of security, aren’t met, is the pursuit of poetry superfluous? Can the very thing to which we’ve devoted our lives—writing words—be nothing more than mere vanity? A luxury that, at the end of the day, leaves hungry bellies growling? 

Do words really matter, or is that just hyped-up fluff Robin Williams sold us on when we were young, impressionable kids? 

V.

When I was in kindergarten, I remember having an analogy workbook.

Every day, I would sit at a tucked-away table with my teacher as she read this-is-to-that sentences to me and asked me to fill in the correct bubbles. Sweet is to sour as lost is to found. Cat is to catnip as dog is to bone. 

Even now as a grown adult, I find myself moving about my days, stretching to make analogies amidst the chaos. (I guess I have Mrs. Paul to thank for that.) It’s been ingrained in me since my youth. So perhaps that’s why, the day after encountering Gate’s poem, I was hit by a Mack-truck of an analogy when I opened my Bible to the book of John and read, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1). 

Jesus is also known as the Word. How had I not registered the poignancy of this before? My brain immediately got to work on a new this-is-to-that statement. 

Jesus is God with physical dimensions. He is a corporeal iteration of the otherwise intangible. When Jesus came to earth, he—who had partaken in the creation of the universe, who had existed outside of space and time as we understand it—he took on toes and ears, hands and eyes. He gave form to the infinite in order to present God to humans in a way we could understand. 

And isn’t this what words do too, when they’re at their best—take the stuff of God and deliver it in a way that can be touched and held, grasped and understood? They take the abstract and make it tangible. 

Jesus is to God as words are to the Kingdom: revelations of existence beyond what these earthly bodies can touch and see. 

Even with this analogy in hand, I can still hear Gate and the existential boogeyman protesting, “But the children are still hungry! The cancer is still spreading! Death is still knocking!” And oh, what a compelling argument that is. 

But I also hear Jesus telling his disciples, “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst” (John 6:3-5). He is offering himself as food from an alternate Kingdom. He is operating within a reality that exists beyond the physical. He is standing in the gap between humanity and Heaven and saying, “Here, take this body of mine and eat. Use this body of mine to access God. Partake of me—and in doing so, partake in eternity.” 

If we place sourdough into hungry, outstretched hands, we satiate grumbling stomachs for a few hours. And if we offer cool water to the cracked lips of the dying, we give momentary relief. There is no doubt about it: these are noble and worthy pursuits, and ones which Jesus urges us to do. But in light of our shared mortality—and the fact that none of us can evade it, in the end—it seems that the bread of the Kingdom should not be disqualified as a lesser form of sustenance, but rather as an essential one.

The Word came to earth as an iteration of God we could not only understand, but that we could also partake of, filling our spirits with the kind of nourishment this world simply cannot supply. This is a different type of bread, yes. But to consider it superfluous to life, or a vanity, or a luxury? Impossible.

What does Jesus’ designation as the Word mean for language, then? It means that words can be used as instruments of revelation. They can corral the cosmos and give form to the infinite. They have the unique ability to connect humans with the Holy One, pushing their hands together and saying, “Take hold!” They help us partake in eternity even now, earthbound and gravity-ridden though we are. 

Words, at their best, are the bread of the Kingdom.

And so perhaps you can eat a poem. 

VI.

I was young and idealistic, that day I lost myself on the sandbar and then ran without stopping back to my dorm to write the story.

My head was filled with the voice of Mr. Keating, whispering Whitmanisms like, “The powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.” 

What I had wanted most at that time was to engage with the beauty, the romance, the verve of life, and then to package the whole pulsating thing into something to give the world. I wanted to contribute a verse, and I believed that writing words was the most powerful way to do that. 

I now see that I was wrong and I was right.

A verse written for self—to propel or prop up or make prosperous—it is a vanity. It is ash in the mouths of hungry children. It is salt on the chapped lips of the dying. It is temporal and fleeting. It cannot feed the hungry children of Rafah. 

But a verse rising to meet its highest calling—one that mingles in the otherworldly territory of the Kingdom, then brings God so close he can be touched and seen and experienced by others? Well, this is more essential than even our daily bread. 

In a world where we are all but a whisper’s-width from death, words that bring humanity closer to holiness can serve as a continuation of the work that Jesus started thousands of years ago. 

So. When the boogeyman comes swinging—when children are starving and cancer is spreading and death is knocking—is there any truth in the notion that our words could ever really matter? 

The short of it is this: If we are handing humanity the bread of the Kingdom, then the answer is an absolute and resounding yes. With this assurance, we can wholeheartedly echo the sentiments of the legendary Mr. Keating: 

“No matter what anybody tells you, words and ideas can change the world.”

Photo by Mae Mu on Unsplash