The How and Why – Photo by Doreen Salli

My sister Doreen and I are poets. Recently, without discussion, 650 miles apart, on the exact same day, we each wrote a new poem. Something in the way our country has been changing is driving poets to pick up their pens. In this essay, which we’re writing together, we’d like to share the poems we wrote so unknowingly and mysteriously on that day, to explain the how and why: how it is we wrote them, why we see the things we wrote as mattering to more than ourselves. We live, after all, in a large community called the United States, made up of smaller communities with their own integrity and cultures. How do we live good, honorable lives as individuals? How do we turn outward and live with concern for the group? Poetry is a way of thinking about those things—it’s one part language, nine parts nuance.

We’ll begin with Doreen’s poem, and then her reflection on how it came to be.

* * * * *

Sleepless …………………. by Doreen Salli
       for Alex Pretti

Sleepless have I been since I saw you fall
on that Minnesota street in the bitter cold,
thinking how you might have healed us all.

If you would just get up, if you still
had breath to move, to help, to heal, to grow old–
sleepless I have been since I saw you fall,

or rather since I saw you pushed and pulled,
down and down, left facedown in the street by icy hands.
They could not see your power to heal us all,

your hand that nursed the sick and held
the hands of dying men. You saw them to a world
of quiet sleep, where we no longer fall.

I saw you help a shattered woman up, shield
her from blows, before the hell of ice rained
down on you. I know you would have tried to heal us all,

if you could. I hear your gentle voice call
out as you reach for the fallen: I’ve got you. Are you OK?
I’ve been sleepless since I saw you fall,
thinking that you could still heal us all.

* * * *

When Snow Falls Up: The How and Why of “Sleepless”

Last week, I sat on my couch in my little apartment, sixteen floors above the city, far from Minneapolis. It was snowing, big fluffy flakes, but the snow was not falling down. It was falling up. It was a very strange feeling, as if I were in a snow globe that had been violently shaken and held upside down. I was rewatching video after video of Alex Pretti’s murder in Minneapolis, watching him help a woman who had been pushed down get up off the street, and hearing him say over and over again: Are you ok? I watched him again and again protect her with his own body, then watched him fall. I knew he would never get up again. My heart was breaking.

For days I had not been able to sleep, my mind taken over by all the horrible images on those city streets: people being seized without warrants signed by a judge, and without care for their actual immigration status; protestors peacefully taking videos being pushed and shoved by federal agents, and pepper sprayed right in the face; citizens arrested for simply being there. As I sat there, in my little apartment, watching the smoke from flash bangs rising above the streets of Minneapolis, my eyes were burning. I took a deep, shaky breath, and suddenly words popped into my head, as clearly as if someone had spoken them out loud right next to me: “Sleepless I have been since I saw you fall.”

As soon as I heard it, I knew it was the line of a poem. I sat down with pen and paper, and with shaky hands started to write. I soon had two lines that would work nicely as refrains in a villanelle, a traditional French form. I had to work with these two repeating phrases in a given order, using a designated pattern of rhyme. I’ve never felt such a strong sense of urgency, a necessity to speak, as the day I wrote this poem. While I worked to come up with these lines, my hands were sweating, and my whole body was shaking. It felt like that moment of agony right before giving birth. This poem insisted on being born.

These days, when I write, I want my words to make a difference. We can’t bring Alex Pretti back, but we can honor his kindness, his bravery, his heroism. We can celebrate his calling as a healer. I hope we can look back on his death as a turning point that shifted us towards a fairer democracy than we have now, one that’s truly of the people, by the people, and for the people. Toward that end, we can help by calling our representatives to tell them what we think. We can talk to each other about what’s really happening to our neighbors and to the rule of law. We can brainstorm together what that new democracy would look like. And of course, we can vote.

We can also use our talents in support of democracy: we can write, sing, play piano, paint, draw pictures or cartoons, knit, sew, bake, or cook an amazing meal for democracy; we can clear a field of brush and thorns, plant a garden, share our produce; we can build new houses and barns, fix cars, repair what is broken in this world. Whatever your talent may be, create a community around it. Have fun, and make our country stronger.

After I finished writing my poem, the wind died down outside my window, and the snow began to fall towards the earth again. The snow globe was no longer being shaken, and we had been set back down to earth, right side up. My thoughts began to settle down, along with the falling snow. So things returned to a new kind of normal for me, but not for Alex. And certainly not for this country. Not yet. We still have a lot of work to do.

All that being said, I can’t explain the larger how and why—how it is that Donna and I wrote what turned out to be companion poems at the same time, independently, in different states—650 miles apart. We’ll marvel at the mystery of it all, and hope they’ll make a difference.

* * * * *

And now, here’s Donna’s poem, written that same day:

This Safe and Pretty Town …… by Donna Salli

This morning, so sun-brightened and pretty,
the world seems to listen, its winter-sharpened ears
turned toward the south, where a crying din rises—
hard fists raised against a bunny hat, other hands
clasped, we’re not alone, a city of hearts drawn,
black, brown, white, to and by all that’s good.

And the feet of the deer trace their good
path past my window, here in this safe and pretty
town where the million branches of trees draw
to themselves the feet of eager birds, their ears
cocked, hearts beating so quietly, willing the hands
behind the mysterious, dangerous glass to rise

from their safe couches, to rise
scarf-bedecked and gloved, to fill the good
feeders, here in this town where no icy hands
are raised against us in the streets, in this pretty
comfortable town. The twitching ears
of the deer know no illusions, drawn,

as if of one heart, we’re not alone, drawn
beautifully along the path, the cries rising
from the south so loudly now that the ears
of the stones must hear and cry out, over the good
not done, the too many of us in our pretty
towns reaching for a sort of shroud, hands

crossed willingly at our breast, safe hands
reluctant, hidden, as if the smallest drawn
breath could unleash a sword against our pretty
lives. The safe, pretty town that raised
me has a sadness now, one of our own good
hearted sons dead in the street. Whoever has ears

to hear, counsels the wise, dog-eared
book in my palm, ancient, creased by faithful hands
over centuries. Now again the deer find their good
way back. Their eyes meet mine, so deep, they draw
my heart toward hope. The cries rising
from the city of hearts, circling above the pretty

trees, are haunting. What my ears hear must draw,
past caution, this fearful hand, coax it to rise
toward the truly pretty, all that is good.

* * * * *

The How and Why of “This Safe and Pretty Town”

So, Doreen and I both grew up to become poets. I’d bet our mother and father, working-class children of immigrants, often shook their heads over it. Our mother used to read poems to us when we were small, and Doreen and I were so drawn to poetry that we both studied writing as an art. We’re northerners, born and bred. Like so many others, we’ve been heavy-hearted over what’s happening in Minneapolis. Here’s the question I’ve been struggling over. What does one do about what’s happening in places like Minneapolis, when it seems there’s little you can do?

I’ve lived in outstate Minnesota, north of Minneapolis and St. Paul, for more than thirty years. This winter, ice is heavy on the lakes, heavier in the streets. What’s happening in the Twin Cities with the surge of federal agents has moved beyond politics to the seemingly personal. Why here? Why so especially aggressive and horrible? Even here in the outstate, you can’t help but feel it. What do you do, when you’re not at the epicenter, but you see the world around you turning into a sort of hell? Nothing? Anything?

Doreen and I—most poets, I’d guess—write poetry because art has the power to dispel the horrible. When our hearts are in need of comfort, writing poetry provides it. During times of distress, times that call for clear thought, we start hearing phantom lines of poetry. Art also records our collective experience for history, from the perspective of one mind at a time. Doreen and I didn’t know we were writing these new poems until she sent me a text asking if I’d look at a new poem of hers. We often do that, for another set of eyes, perspective outside ourselves.

We’d had no idea we were both at work on a new poem—even less idea that we’d both chosen to write them using traditional poetic forms. She, a villanelle—me, a sestina. Both the villanelle and the sestina are old French forms. They’re beautiful, built around a set structure and a pre-ordained rotation of repeated words or phrases. Writing poetry of any kind takes the mind out of useless worrying and sets it to purposeful contemplation—especially writing a poem using an established verse form. It’s a process of trial and error, to choose repeating words or phrases that will fly, not fail.

Does it seem strange to be talking about poetic forms? Patience. It matters.

The sestina I was writing is a poem of six stanzas of six lines each, with a three-line stanza at the end called the envoi. To add a musical sort of power, six words of the writer’s choosing rotate in a given order at the ends of lines, all six appearing in the envoi. A poet chooses words that reflect the subject of the poem and are also versatile, able to work as a noun or verb, an adjective or adverb.

It was this choosing of words that made me realize I had a poem wanting to be born. The deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti had seared their names into my mind. Good, Pretti. Good, Pretti. Soon the refrain morphed to good, pretty, and I knew that I was four words away from writing a sestina. I sat down, went to work, and was closing in on the last stanzas when Doreen’s text binged in. Within minutes, she’d sent her poem, and it was a bit amazing to see how in parallel we were in what we were writing. We had even used some of the same language.

Most poetry written now is free verse—no predetermined structure, no rhyme. I hadn’t written a poem in traditional form in years. Neither had Doreen. But we’d both instinctively turned to the power of long-established forms for the poems we were writing.

It’s not surprising. Those old forms impose order on things that people wonder about, quandaries maybe, or questions without answers. The difficult subject of Renee and Alex’s deaths required that we think twice, that we not say the easy, expected thing. We especially had to avoid platitudes and political-speak. Meeting the given form, breaking the form to make it your own, is a good way to open doors in your thinking. You can go where you wouldn’t normally go, had your conscious mind been solely in charge. It struck us, immediately, as eerie that we’d picked up our pens at the same time, written about the same thing, even used the same language—as if we were meant to, something “out there” intentionally nudging us.

We know people in Minneapolis and its surrounds. We know their good hearts. The stories they’re sharing about what’s going on in their neighborhoods, even outside their front doors, are horrifying. Their stories have raised in me contradictory feelings, and it’s hard to decide which is stronger: fear for the people telling them, or admiration for their resistance to the cruelty they’re seeing.

There’s a hidden story here, in the writing of these two poems. Alex Pretti, whom life had called to work as an ICU nurse at the Minneapolis VA, has roots where Doreen’s and my roots are—a small town in the northern Midwest, surrounded by forests and lakes. Doreen went to high school with Alex’s father. They ran track together, and all these years later, she grieves for him. The thing about where we were born is this: there’s strong community identity, a shared sense of your family is our family—no matter how many ethnicities or races or religions there are amongst us, or even how many generations removed. Our present divisive politics might complicate that, but it will never overcome our sense of community. Politics and politicians come and go, like the spring ice from our lakes, but the family of community endures.

What does one do? This pair of sisters wrote poems, our hands reached out to anyone who reads them. Poetry is art, and art has the power to change those creating it and those who encounter it, whether on paper or on a screen, on canvas, through music, or on a stage. That picture of the child detained wearing a bunny hat! So blue, so searing. The image, along with other unjust images from the streets that day, led lines of poetry to spontaneously appear. The how and why of it is a mystery.

We hope these poems, born together, offer calm and light. Poetry nudges us out of our comfortable place and asks us to consider the world differently—more clearly, perhaps, or more humbly, and when necessary, more honestly. I hope, too, that we all might see wisdom, and even grace, in not saying the easy, the expected thing.

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