Please note: This essay contains descriptions of violence in Ukraine which some Friends may find disturbing.
Dear Friends,
For the last two decades, I’ve been living with the question: What does it mean to bear witness? How does bearing witness to our children’s joys and sorrows deepen our own understanding of life’s transience? How can the act of paying attention shape a more intentional sense of purpose and our unique place in time?
Recently, these questions have felt more urgent—perhaps because of the rising divisions in our nation and our world. Perhaps also, for me, because of intense challenges in my personal life, including breast cancer and divorce. In the last few years, I’ve leaned more deeply into these questions about bearing witness, about radical attention as a form of devotion, worship, prayer. Imagination is better than a sharp instrument, the poet Mary Oliver once wrote. To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.
I am a novelist, but my first love is poetry. That’s been true since I was a child. I love poetry for the line breaks and the tensile interplay between words and silence intrinsic to a poem. I love how, in poetry, an emotion can flow off the end of one line, hurtling toward the next. A poem often works toward a “volta,” also called the “turn,” a moment of dramatic change of thought and feeling. Poems come to me in fragments. When I begin a poem, I often start with only fragments, and my task is to discern how those pieces might assemble into a dynamic living whole.
I have faith in the power of revelation that comes from those places inside us that are broken. Points of fracture, even hurt, where feeling is deep. I believe that if we can allow our attention—without judgment—to move into the complex inner self where painful emotions flail and dig and rise, those interior fault lines can open—into empathy, accountability, compassion, and even regret. I love those familiar words of Leonard Cohen: Forget your perfect offering/There is a crack, a crack in everything/That’s how the light gets in.
Since early March, I have been sitting with a more specific question: What does it mean to bear witness to the violence in the Ukraine? How can I even begin to reconcile the privilege of life—my very average American life, and my day-to-day work as a writer—with the unthinkable acts of atrocity and war unfolding in that region? Families torn apart, displaced. Civilians tortured, executed. Children. Young parents flung over the body of their 18-month-old killed in the road.
I spent an hour one afternoon sitting with a photograph of a group of young Ukrainians who stood in a bombed-out street wearing their skateboarding kneepads. Young men the age of my two sons, heading off in those kneepads to fight in the Ukrainian army. Last week I wrote a poem about those boys. It’s raw. Still handwritten, still unfinished. But it exists. Two pages in my notebook that are a testament to that photograph and those boys. I have thought of them each day since I wrote that poem; I’ve recalled their faces, and I’ve wondered where they are now, at this precise moment.
A few days ago, I read about a mother in a central Ukrainian village whose only son was killed. She brought his body home in a wheelbarrow and buried him in her garden. She dug his shallow grave. His name was Oleskei. He was 27. I wrote a poem about that garden and the earth in the shape of a boy wrapped in a rug, his mother standing over the boy she’d raised and the hole she’d dug, feeling the devastating weight of the love a mother has for her child, which is a love that does not end just because he is not there.
These are small offerings, so imperfect. Raw and incomplete. And still new, because this practice I have committed to is new. I am rusty at it. A beginner. For now, I understand, it needs to be that way. I need to let these nascent poems come to me—as love does, as grief does, as our spiritual life often does—in fragments, out of the sense of helpless devastation I feel for a sundered world that is not mine, that I can’t ever really claim or touch or see or know.
Each day though, still, I dedicate time to this. I read accounts of the lives, these tragically human stories. I seek them out. I write them down. I bear witness, alone, to the names and slight details that summon the edge of a life. A young woman named Anastasiia, who was dropping off dog food to a shelter in Bucha and was shot at close range, killed. Her life—the work and service of it, the end of it—feels too wildly removed from mine. I know, too clearly, that any issue or challenge or hardship I imagine I’m facing pales against this. Anastasiia, 26, who was carrying food for a shelter. Oleskei and his mother’s wheelbarrow. He was her only son. That group of boys in the skateboard kneepads, whose names were not recorded, striding down the street toward some fate, unknown and maybe still unaccounted for.
I read and take those details into me. I let them settle. I transmute them into raw lines on a page—lines that risk, lines that fail, lines that are broken and incomplete, that are not enough, that will never be enough. I know that, too, and part of my work is to be at peace with knowing that and to continue nonetheless. To let fragments be just that. Fragments—sharp and lit—unassembled, unfinished, but perhaps belonging to some future, more cogent, meaningful order I have not yet reached.
In the Light,
Dawn Tripp