On Decency

A poem

I wrote this a few days after November 5, feeling around in the opaque aftermath for what this moment requires of us. The only peace I can make with it is a kind that is always with us - that there’s a goodness we can find in each other, no matter the condition. What came out was a kind of meditation on the insufficient necessity of being good to one another. Many kind-hearted people came to mind as I was writing this, but any time I was stuck on a line, not sure what I was grasping for, I thought of my grandpa. There’s a scene of my life stored safely in the sepia of my crystallized memory that will never come unglued: me and my cousin crying in the backyard as we were reprimanded by my grandma for whatever it was we were surely guilty of, every cheek on our bodies red, and my grandpa walking out of the house with a final stern but loving word and popsicles in his hands, frozen libations of forgiveness. In this poem, I tried to capture the kind of decency he brought to this world. It’s been almost a quarter of a century since he’s been with us, but his compassion echoes still, ringing brightly in everyone who knew him.

On Decency

For Jack Clowry

To be decent is to not seek the extraordinary
Instead, it turns the ordinary sublime
A modesty, unfiltered
Ingredient to a whole
and content with that very notion
No champagne, no parade
Quiet in its small victories
Which anger can find but never overcome
because decency sees something more
Something bigger than us, this moment, this misery
It does not put sugar on grapefruit
There’s a clarity in its nature
It does not predict the future or dwell on the past
Its only certainties are self contained
The visceral powers wielded by mercy are alien to it
The porous wrath of cruelty, of no use
There’s an ease to it, even if it’s not always easy
Nestled between curiosity and a prying disposition
Decency lets the answers come when they are ready
A patience, troubled by this world 
but sure of a generous spirit, a giving posture
Open to anything it can recognize
Decency takes your eyes as its own
Blessing even the pain it cannot comprehend
Ratifying life in each way it comes
Finding absolution everywhere
A goodness, still ripe in the gray light 
of times tattered by rapacity
Decency sometimes is not enough
It wins no wars alone
But calls victors back to their brotherhood
Like sand back to the stone