It helps––though nothing helps.

~ Natalie Goldberg, Upaya Zen Podcast, Awakening through Haiku

It has snowed, and this story ends with the most glorious flawless blue sky above the white-cold branches. My body says: go for a long relaxing walk. My spirit says, let some beautiful pictures find you––quietly. My hearts says, listen to the news, and I do, and then it says, listen to something that is not news, as the news is terrible and heartbreaking and disturbing. I listen to a recent podcast, Upaya Zen, a monastery and retreat center in Santa Fe, that has a wonderful podcast, and Natalie Goldberg is a frequent presenter. She has a new one up about Awakening Through Haiku. I immediately know my heart has chosen well, as I walk with Charlie and Suzi through the inches of fresh snow, I am immersed in the beauty in my ears, and my eyes. But, as she says at the start of the podcast, “It helps––though nothing helps.” I get what she means. It’s how I feel about her presentation. It helps––though nothing helps, because the suffering and inhumanity in Ukraine are a constant that people are living through. Snow. It’s clean and fresh and lovely above me, around me, under my feet. They are melting snow to drink and cook in the cities without electricity and water and heat. A wife who has escaped from Mariupol keeps calling her husband who is still there and so are her parents, and she asks him why is he not talking to her and he says because what is there to say, my feet are wet and I cannot dry or warm them, and your parents house has a roof but no windows and we have, perhaps, food for a few days. The Special One and I play a game I invented before bedtime: Roly Poly Mountain and this is his favorite game. We roll on the bed and I pretend to fall off and land on the floor and he follows and then I help him climb up again and we roll and roll and roll of the other side and get up again, and we keep falling off and getting back on, and we squeal and groan a lot pretending to be frightened or catastrophically hurt. I have not nailed the ending of my troubled poem. I go searching, again, for advice from other poets. It’s my poem and my problem to solve and I might fail to adequately solve it to anyone’s satisfaction. The pictures I took today are a wonderful closure for me to observe on this day: I thank them.

And like most of us writing and rewriting poems, I was thinking less of closure when it came to endings, and more in terms of successful versus unsuccessful. I was interested in having each piece cohere, in feeling that the poem satisfied itself.

~ Barbara Myers, Excerpt from How Poems Work: Excerpt from ‘On ending a poem’