Poetry for Hard Times | Margaret A. Haberman
Poetry, in addition to being a dialogue with the reader, is a conversation the writer has with themselves. For me, that conversation is often about including the right measure of emotions and details, considering whom I am speaking to, and how much to say–—as well as how much to withhold. After losing one of my best friends to breast cancer, in 2009, I tried for years to write a poem about her called Wearing Your Clothes. I could never get the ingredients right—something about it stayed in a seesaw of too close or too removed.
I wrote the poem below, “After the Shooting”, a few weeks after the mass shooting in Lewiston, Maine, on October 25, 2023. I have a close connection to the Deaf community in Maine and knew the deaf victims and survivors. I lost a colleague and friend; one of my family members and his girlfriend were at Schemengees Bar and Grill and managed to escape.
Sometimes I think of the shootings as a kind of tsunami that hit Maine with the victims, survivors, and family members standing on the shore directly in line of the giant wave, the rest of us witnessing and feeling varying degrees of devastation and destruction.
In the early days following that assault, I couldn’t imagine writing anything. I jotted down phrases, words, sometimes a sentence on little scraps of paper. But it was hard to imagine how to make any of that into a poem.
Once, when I told a friend that my emotions were “driving me crazy,” she asked if that happened when I was writing poetry. Somehow her question encapsulated the work that goes into writing about difficult things. Like the process of trying to write for my friend after her death, emotions have to be held at a bit of a distance—as if I were taking something out of the deepest pockets of my jeans, holding it in my hands and seeing its texture and shape.
The opening line of this poem was rambling around in my head in mid-November as I walked through the Veterans Memorial Cemetery in Augusta, a place I often went to walk and think in between work commitments. I felt myself on that familiar seesaw—too far out and I’d lose the emotional core of the experience, too close in and I’d lose control of the writing as well as my relationship to the reader. Eventually this poem—about this particular “hard time”—emerged out of those wanderings, and the back and forth of distance and proximity.
“After the Shooting”
Do I look fat in this poem?
You can tell me the truth.
I mean it, here, when you look
at the middle, is it too much?
Where I go on about
what it was like to listen
to their stories—they had to
tell their stories—what they
saw, how they got out, who
they held and who they tried
to save. Their friends—gone.
And this part—
about walking through
the cemetery wondering
how do they know when
to raise the flags back to full
from half-mast. There must
be a rule. A book of rules
about death and tragedy,
murder and flags.
Or this part here—
eating homemade pesto
in my car as I drove
between churches
and funeral homes,
spooning it out
from a little glass jar,
sustenance from
Anna Maria,
comforting as I drove
to one more wake, one
more reading
of scripture.
One more.
Tasting the twinkle of mint,
the gravity of the basil
and oil, the crunchy
reassurance of walnuts—
I wonder is it unflattering?
Do I need to change, find
a new pair of black shoes,
pants that match the same
black jacket I’ve been wearing
for two weeks?
Maybe my scuffed shoes
weren’t the best choice.
I might need to change
this stanza the place
where the Baptist minister
said three times,
over
and over
and over,
God
didn’t need
any more
angels.
Margaret Haberman lives and writes in Belfast, Maine. She is, by profession, an American Sign Language interpreter. Her poems have been published in the Island Journal, the journal Spiritus, and selected for the Maine Public Radio program Poems from Here.
