Poem Post #2

Back when I was in grad school, I took a class on caring during crisis - specifically spiritual distress and how to deal with it when your faith or the faith of someone close to you has been rocked by a traumatic event. The following poems was in one of our texts and I don't think I have ever connected with a poem so dramatically at the time I read it. The idea of this "fact of glass," that there are some things that cannot be changed no matter how many times you bang your head up against them, resonated. It's hard to really say why this poem is so important to me, even all these years later but every time I read it, it rings through me.

Up Against It 
By Eamon Grennan

It’s the way they cannot understand the window

they buzz and buzz against, the bees that take

a wrong turn at my door and end up thus

in a drift at first of almost idle curiosity,

cruising the room until they find themselves

smack up against it and they cannot fathom how

the air has hardened and the world they know

with their eyes keeps out of reach as, stuck there

with all they want just in front of them, they must

fling their bodies against the one unalterable law

of things—this fact of glass—and can only go on

making the sound that tethers their electric

fury to what’s impossible, feeling the sting in it.

Do you have any poems that resonate with you? I'd love to read them! Post in the comments (can be original or not).