—after Gwendolyn Brooks
No matter the pull toward brink. No
matter the florid, deep sleep awaits.
There is a time for everything. Look,
just this morning a vulture
nodded his red, grizzled head at me,
and I looked at him, admiring
the sickle of his beak.
Then the wind kicked up, and,
after arranging that good suit of feathers
he up and took off.
Just like that. And to boot,
there are, on this planet alone, something like two
million naturally occurring sweet things,
some with names so generous as to kick
the steel from my knees: agave, persimmon,
stick ball, the purple okra I bought for two bucks
at the market. Think of that. The long night,
the skeleton in the mirror, the man behind me
on the bus taking notes, yeah, yeah.
But look; my niece is running through a field
calling my name. My neighbor sings like an angel
and at the end of my block is a basketball court.
I remember. My color’s green. I’m spring.
—for Walter Aikens
“Our life is shaped by our mind; we become what we think.” So says the Dhammapada, a text central in Buddhism. Should this be the case, then according to contemporary neuroscience, we will need to work actively to counter the mind’s automatic tendencies to focus on the painful and disappointing. For evolutionary reasons that helped early humans survive, we are born today with brains hardwired with a “negativity bias.” It is said that bad experiences stick to our brains like velcro, but good experiences quickly wash away like liquid off a teflon surface.
In Sorrow is Not My Name, written after poet Gwendolyn Brooks, Ross Gay reminds us that when we incline our minds toward noticing and savoring all that is working and bountiful and good, we can delightfully become what we think. In this case, spring.
