Outro: To Hear the Birds
By Niall Twohig
In order for me to write poetry that isn’t political
I must listen to the birds
and in order to hear the birds
the warplanes must be silent.
– Marwan Makhoul
Strange days, these are. Heavy and weighed down by a distant suffering that doesn’t feel so distant for some of us. That dread cry of a mother holding her lifeless child ripples sonorously across the globe, touching a classmate in the seat next to us. And she cries to us. We hear it, but do we listen?
That student has been driven by that cry. Driven hard. I witnessed her writing and pleading with professors to listen, to stop acting as if everything is normal, to acknowledge the administration and police’s violent dismantling of peaceful protest, to see the genocide that protest sought to make visible, to acknowledge our complicity. No response. And, when she follows up in person, only a raised eyebrow that says, “silly kid; know your place. Sit back down.”
But that doesn’t stop this student. It only drives her on. Harder.
Days later, I see her and her friends making protest posters rather than attending class. There will be no reward for this labor. Only bad grades. But this is their school now: these renegade spaces in yet outside the machine. Spaces where the movement of their hands is innervated, not by grades, but by the other’s suffering and by communal joy. The riot police attempted to end that joy with batons and pepper spray. The fact that this student and her friends are still moving shows me where the police failed. They cannot zip tie or arrest liberation, just as their counterparts cannot blow it up or starve it. That desire survives, fugitively, in places unseen. It lingers and flows, passing from hand to hand and word to ear, hidden like contraband.
But still, my worries linger. As do my questions:
How will this student last for the long haul, for that arduous journey where she may never see any results, where she may in fact see a greater backlash and a horrific intensification of the violence she and her friends resist?
In response to such questions, I could point her to the wisdom of the radical priest Daniel Berrigan who, when asked “how do we become activists” replied:
“But that is not the question at all. Here’s a better one: ‘Can we uncover the contemplative springs that are the source of our humanity?” Can we clear the waters of our soul, that the streams may run free?”
But I need not teach this student Fr. Berrigan’s wisdom. For she is already embodying that wisdom in her own way. I saw it when she came to office hours two weeks after the encampment was violently cleared.
“How’s it going?” I ask her.
She says much without saying a word, then punctuates the silence with “hard.”
Another pause. She senses my concern even as I try to conceal it, then tenderly reassures me. “There has been some rest,” she says. “I gave myself a day to do nothing. I took a vow of silence. No speaking to friends, no words at all. I just walked, looked at green grass and flowers, listened to birds.”
“It was necessary,” she concludes as much for herself as for me. “We had been pushing too hard.”
That last “we” tips me off to the fact that this student is not practicing self-care as marketed by the neoliberal university and capitalist social order beyond it. That is, self-care as a means of refueling so one can return to the race and hustle for individual success (she is wise to the hidden corporate shackles of that game!)
Instead, she practices a radical form of care through contemplation. Contemplation allows her to reconnect to the Source. She gains life from Life, so that she can bring life back to the movement. In this way, her self-care becomes other care. Without this care, drawn from contemplation, the movement to which she belongs risks starving, drying up, or worse: taking on the unnatural character of the monster it resists.
That monster, we are wise to remember, is antithetical to life. Its way is the way of Thanatos, its physics is that of the bomb. To fight that monster, we cannot disconnect ourselves and our movements from everything It seeks to annihilate. When we do that, It has already won.
So, we must rest. We who are not under the bombs. We who are called by conscience. We must find that quiet, that holy land of the here and now, where birds sing and where Gods speaks. We are not being selfish when we return to that land. We are, in fact, feeding ourselves and, in turn, feeding a movement that reaches towards our brothers and sisters in the rubble, that moves its hands and feet toward a horizon where the poet’s children or grandchildren will hear the birds and write their song of freedom.