A.E. Stallings: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

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Empathy

My love, I’m grateful tonight

Our listing bed isn’t a raft

Precariously adrift

As we dodge the coast guard light,

And clasp hold of a girl and a boy.

I’m glad we didn’t wake

Our kids in the thin hours, to take

Not a thing, not a favorite toy,

And didn’t hand over our cash

To one of the smuggling rackets,

That we didn’t buy cheap life jackets

No better than bright orange trash

And less buoyant. I’m glad that the dark

Above us is not deeply twinned

Beneath us, and moiled with wind,

And we don’t scan the sky for a mark,

Any mark, that demarcates a shore

As the dinghy starts taking on water.

I’m glad that our six-year-old daughter,

Who can’t swim, is a foot off the floor

In the bottom bunk, and our son

With his broken arm’s high and dry,

That the ceiling is not seeping sky,

With our journey but hardly begun.

Empathy isn’t generous,

It’s selfish. It’s not being nice

To say I would pay any price

Not to be those who’d die to be us.

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A.E. Stallings is an American poet in Greece. She has published four volumes of verse and a selected poems (This Afterlife), the last with Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the U.S. and Carcanet in the U.K. She has also published three volumes of verse translation, most recently an illustrated The Battle Between the Frogs and the Mice with Paul Dry Books. A prose book, Frieze Frame: How Poets, Painters, and their Friends Framed the Debate Around Elgin and the Marbles of the Parthenon, is just out with Paul Dry Books. Stallings is currently the Oxford Professor of Poetry. [Author photo by Kostas Mantziaris.]
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                       Théodore Géricault, The Raft of Medusa (1818–19), oil on canvas, Louvre, Paris

Comments

[Sr. Leslie]

Woa…what a powerful, heartbreaking and honest poem!…This just leveled me…thank you Terence and A.E….

[Jack Ridl]

Talk about ease; talk about not making sure we see the mastery.
Thank you.

[Bob Holman]

A foot off the floor!

[Joanna Sit]

Lovely. Fluid. Genuine.

[lally]

what a gut punch of a poem

[Terence Winch]

Thanks for the comment, Leslie.

[Dr. Earle Hitchner]

My introduction to the brilliance of A.E. Stallings came shamefully late: in the October 2002 issue of POETRY magazine that featured her poem "Sine Qua Non." I was gobsmacked by its formalist invention and overall architecture. Terence Winch's inspired selection of her poem "Empathy" as today's "Pick of the Week" coaxes those same feelings from me. The pleasure of any encounter with verse by Stallings is how she first ensorcels us through narrative and then compels us to go back and reread with a focus on form, including her deft touch with rhyme that avoids what I'd call signposting. Thanks, Terence, for reminding me of how preternaturally gifted a poet she is. P.S. The visual complement of Géricault's THE RAFT OF MEDUSA is no less spot-on.

[Terence Winch]

Thanks, Earle. Your comment is right on target, as always.

[David Beaudouin]

What a stunning poem—it gets better with each read. The breathless narrative tension, the subtle form with its slant rhymes, the lyrical inversion in the last stanza all add up to deliver a tremendous emotional effect. Thanks, A.E. and Terence!

[Bill Nevins]

Deft touch. Breathless narrative. Masterful poet. Yup. Can't disagree.

[David Lehman]

Terrific poem and inspired choice of painting.

[Terence Winch]

David: thanks for the comment.

[Eileen Reich]

Wonderful poem.

[M. C. Rush]

Brava!

[Clarinda]

Yes technically brilliant but waaay more than that.

[Rafiq Kathwari]

Refugees adrift on a leaking boat —— that’s who and where we are . . .

[T R Poulson]

Brutally honest poem. I don't remember where I saw it before, but loved it then and still do

[Maureen Owen]

Such is the most difficult witness to bear! Hats off!