Whispering Nightcrawlers

I went to Poetry for Peace on Wednesday. The theme for the reading was “the politics of hunger”. Nearly every reader mentioned something about the election and how incredibly awesome it was that Obama won. One woman’s poems were quite literal and hypotactic. She wrote about the dreams she had for a better world. It was sweet but not particularly complex.
Two women read poems in Spanish and then in English. I like listening to foreign languages, it’s calming because I can’t tell if they’ve mad a mistake, it all sounds fluid and perfect.
The entire time, I was thinking about reading a poem by the Japanese poet Chiri that goes as follows:

Basho, with your grass pillow, what underground sounds come into

your dreams?

Do blue-horned beetles scratch against the starless night sky that

lines your head

with the starless night skies of their own domed backs? Do centipedes

trickle through?

Do worms burrow with their snouts, with their bodies that are

entirely snouts?

Snoozer, I can only ask you this because you are dead asleep:

Do I ever appear as a nightcrawler whispering in your ear?

Are the words, “I love you,” as soft as the cough of a good luck cricket?

I want to read it for my Dad because he sent it to me in an email and I absolutely love it. Poetry for Peace podcasts , so he could listen to it online. But, alas, I am very shy in front of people and I’m not sure if I’ll muster up the courage to do it.
Anyway, the reading was very hopeful despite the depressing theme. I don’t often think of hunger because I have never been without food. To hear poetry about serious hunger was very sad. At the same time, though, the poems were so beautiful that I was nearly grateful for suffering in the world because it prompted these authors to compose such astounding poetry.
It reminded me of the writing that was recovered from concentration camps after the holocaust that were stuffed and pushed into holes in the walls. There is nothing so powerful as real words.
I wish I had a car and a license so I could drive to Potsdam and go to poetry readings there. Maybe we should take a field trip someday…