Vox Populi
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Thomas Lux: Ode to the Unbroken World, Which Is Coming
It must be coming, mustn’t it? Churches
and saloons are filled with decent humans.
A mother wants to feed her daughter,
fathers to buy their children things that break.
People laugh, all over the world, people laugh.
We were born to laugh, and we know how to be sad;
we dislike injustice and cancer,
and are not unaware of our terrible errors.
A man wants to love his wife.
His wife wants him to carry something.
We’re capable of empathy, and intense moments of joy.
Sure, some of us are venal, but not most.
There’s always a punchbowl, somewhere,
in which floats a…
Life’s a bullet, that fast, and the sweeter for it.
It’s the same everywhere: Slovenia, India,
Pakistan, Suriname—people like to pray,
or they don’t,
or they like to fill a blue plastic pool
in the back yard with a hose
and watch their children splash.
Or sit in cafes, or at table with family.
And if a long train of cattle cars passes
along West Ridge
it’s only the cattle from East Ridge going to the abattoir.
The unbroken world is coming,
(it must be coming!), I heard a choir,
there were clouds, there was dust,
I heard it in the streets, I heard it
announced by loudhailers
mounted on trucks.
~~~~~
Copyright © 2015 by Thomas Lux.
Thomas Lux (1946 – 2017) held the Margaret T. and Henry C. Bourne, Jr. Chair in Poetry at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He wrote fourteen books of poetry. He was born in Northampton, Massachusetts, the son of a milkman and a Sears & Roebuck switchboard operator, neither of whom graduated from high school. Lux was raised in Massachusetts on a dairy farm. A Guggenheim Fellow and a recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Lux received the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award for his sixth collection, Split Horizons.
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Such a thoughtful poem, with its kernal of tenderness and regard.
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well-said, Lisa.
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Thomas Lux almost allows me to hope again. Notwithstanding the grimness beneath these lines, there is a wholeness about this poem that makes sense of life in this world.
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Well-said. Thank you, Noelle!
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This poem, almost line by line, causes nods of understanding and little murmurs like “uh-hu’ and “yep” and head nods too.
The lines that resonate most with me: “Churches/ and saloons are filled with decent humans. (And I’m thinking, “of course, there is a relationship—like, drunk on whatever makes good people do bad things.
“Life is a bullet, that fast, and the better for it.” Yeah, our psyches and spirits can only tolerate so much evil…..some of us more than others.
and so much more…
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Thanks, HC.
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He was just so good! What a loss! And what a terrific poem!
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Sean, Laure-Ann, Rosemary, Barbara, Donna, Michael, and Others, I so enjoy so many of these posts and would like to “like” them but for some reason, that function doesn’t work lately, though today I was allowed one “Like.” The site seems to want me to log in, but just flashes a blank “page” or square for a moment and doesn’t prompt me.
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I apologize for my dysfunctional and uncooperative website, Mary. I sometimes suspect it was abused as a child.
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I certainly hope not!!
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Sometimes I can like on WordPress but not on Jetpack. May want to try both.
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Thanks, Barb.
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Yes, as everyone says, a perfect poem for this moment. I love its wonders, and also the image of the train “only” going to the abattoir, such a subtle and powerful allusion to the Holocaust, and the terrible ambiguity the syntax creates at the end where the loudhailer announces the unbroken world, but also the choir, clouds, dust, the latter especially. Oh, but let the unbroken world come!
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An astute reading of the poem, Mary. Thank you.
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How I miss my buddy Tom. How I love to re-read his poems when my little hope-flame goes week. Thank you Michael for keeping his work in the present.
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Excuse the typo: I typed too fas, I meant weak, not week!
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Our poets are dying, but more are springing up everywhere.
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Thank heavens, the muses and the small presses for that!
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What strikes me here is the doubt, the wishfulness, the pathos and bravery of all our delusions of hope. From the opening question “It must be coming, mustn’t it?” to the citation of an extremely doubtful source at the end: “I heard it / announced by loudhailers / mounted on trucks.” He’s not announcing that it will happen. All sorts of things might block, stall, divert the coming of an unbroken world. Totalitarianism, eco disasters …
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Thank you Michael for posting this wonderful and sorely needed poem this morning!
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I read the poem before reading about the author and assumed it was just written in response to our moment. I marveled at how the author had captured our time so perfectly. Then I went back…
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This was in response to today’s poem. My other comment referred to the one linked in the chat.
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I hear this poem as in response to Adam Zagajewski’s “Try to Praise the Mutilated World,” which became widely known when it was published after 9/11.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57095/try-to-praise-the-mutilated-world-56d23a3f28187
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Yes, clearly it is a response to Z.’s poem.
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I read Try to Praise…and realized I had read it before. This is a step up from my usual reading poems again for the first time. Perhaps a few neurons have returned or the poem was so powerful it spilled over to the living part of my brain. Thank you.
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I knew Thomas personally and have loved every one of his poems for their heart and their quirkiness. Thank you for the reminder of this one.
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I met Tom a few times through the years, and he was always very generous to other poets. I wish now I’d spent more time with him.
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Yes, he was a generous and kind teacher and gave free workshops in Atlanta, where I was able to take several of them. He also had parties at his house after readings with invited well-known poets. I’m still very good friends with his widow. He was a good man, sorely missed.
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Tom was one of a kind—a wonderful, huge-hearted poet, as anyone who reads this poem-full-of-wonders can see. Bravo, Tom. —Charles
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yes, he was…
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‘it must be coming’… I am beginning to doubt.
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first the darkness, then the light….
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What a perfect poem for today, these days. “Sure, some of us are venal, but not most.” and “We were born to laugh, and we know how to be sad. /We dislike injustice…”. Thanks for chosing this one
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Thanks, Jennifer! I love Tom Lux’s work, and it is especially relevant for these fraught times.
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So warmly posited and written about us—basically a love poem to humankind, or a heart-thrust of possibility by one who could yet find belief in us. So hard to come by, still. All one needs to do is drive to town and see our abject greed in play: the most base institutional obeisance, apathy, nightmares we’ll never waken from, that happened as we dreamt. Yet we must love, as ser Wendell says. It all turns on beauty and affection; and the language of salvation will be different than the language that has gotten us here. Maybe some of these words of St Thomas…
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Happy Friday “farm girl”
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“Yet we must love…” We must love the parts of the world that are unbroken as well as the parts that are broken. I wonder sometimes how Trump became the soulless man he is.
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He was raised by a soulless man. He’s always been “damaged goods.” I’ve known that for 50 years!
How that goes unregistered by his electorate has me completely stymied. I wouldn’t let anyone near him I cared about, yet they come…
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