I Call, You Respond

A Guest Series Curated by Nicole Rollender. Intro to project here.

Call and Response: “The Days”

The late, great Jon Anderson used poetry as a vehicle for stark (and possibly uncomfortable) self-reckoning: “My prime motive for writing is self-confrontation, and I find poems the best way to employ language to do this. My poetry isn’t for everyone. It’s for people like myself who want to contend with themselves. I think of my poems as intimate conversations with close friends, to whom I’m not afraid to reveal my vulnerabilities and loneliness.” The poem, “The Days” comes from In Sepia, which was Anderson’s third book of poems. His poetry is spare and controlled – but movingly precise in emotion and observation.

The Days

All day I bear myself to such reward:
I close my eyes, I can’t sleep,
The trees are whispering flat as water.

My friends’ grayed faces
Do not alter with the weather anymore.
We sit by a stove & talk.
We suffer the terrible news.

Into a world made over & over
You rise each day,
You remember,
& something goes wrong.

God, if I had a wish, I swear
I wouldn’t know what to spend it on.

RESPONSE #3: by Min Derry

Jon Anderson’s “The Days” conjures up a grim and dire reality of the idea of one’s, a family’s, or a community’s end of days. More relevant; however, it bridges the heavy-laden reality of the hopelessness and despair felt by many throughout their individual lives – not being able to identify junctures at which choosing Grace, over fear and hatred, could prove more redemptive, for and from within. Finding a point of rest or pause in the spectrum of, or among the matrices of subconscious, in order to deviate from the self, could be for many, life’s greatest challenge.

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Min Derry is a mother, educator and writer who dances and juggles with her feet in many worlds.