Windows to Creative Expression (BMAC)—Poets and Mentors—Poetry Reading, October 16, 2016. photo by John Willis

Children play in a park in Aleppoâs Midan neighborhood, part of the city that is divided by a front line. Lorenzo Tugnoli for the Washington Post

By Chard deNiord
For the Valley News
Thursday, November 17, 2016

Over the course of the last few months I have been deeply troubled and saddened by the news coming out of Syria, specifically Aleppo where hundreds of children have been killed in targeted attacks by the Assad regime and its allies on their schools and homes. This news came to my attention at the same time I was writing an essay for an exhibition of children’s poetry at the Brattleboro Art Museum called “Windows to Creative Expression,” curated by Ann and Tony Gengarelly. The thrilling metaphorical leaps in many of the poems in this exhibit inspired me to write this opening paragraph to my essay:

“The late Brazilian poet, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, wrote, “I am working on a song / that will awaken men / and make children sleep” in his famous poem Friendly Song. These lines resounded so powerfully among the citizenry of Brazil that they ended up on the country’s bank notes in the 1980s. The conceit of these lines strikes the reader immediately with a beguiling irony that captures both the hypnotic effect of poetry’s verbal music — a music that carries language into the subconscious where it melds with memory — and the revelatory quality of poetry that awakens men and women — both lullaby and alarm.”

What my eye began to see in the dark of the horrific news from Syria was the immeasurable loss of the slain children in Aleppo — so many children’s sacred imagination brutally extinguished. Is it an overstatement to claim that the entire world has been spiritually impoverished by this senseless murder of innocents? Imagine the heroic poems and stories of witness that those slain children might have written about anything they put their minds to, but also specifically about the immense particulars of their individual experiences of extremity and the imaginative sense awaiting them in the course of their writing about their experiences.

I think of some of the lines in the poems from the “Windows to Creative Expression” exhibit that testify to their young authors’ nascent awakening to what John Keats called “negative capability,” namely, that human capacity to exist in “uncertainty, Mystery, doubt without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Here are a few examples of their impressive attempts to cross over from themselves to another:

I realized I was a cut flower

when his anger-filled eyes came to rest upon me

and I wilted a little.

From The Words Out Of My Mouth, the Color From My Eyes, by Frida Rosner, age 15

Emotions are like the rings of a tree,

one inside the other,

working together

to create one’s soul.

They build upon one another.

Each, simple component

joining together.

From The Emotion Tree, by Ella Bathory-Peeler, 14

Poetry is like love armies

that hold off the dark.

If poetry is locked

in a dark trap,

the world will turn black.

From Evil Versus Love by Samuel Garbarino, 10

How I Became Myself

Before the earth was born,

before I became myself

I was the Bird of Beauty and Health.

I had a fawn’s head,

a hummingbird’s body,

a peacock’s tail.

I brought a cure,

a cure of love,

a cure that could help any sickness

no matter how dangerous.

I was the only one of my kind.

I made my voice loud and said:

to those who are lonely and afraid,

there’s always a part of you

that’s leaping with joy.

Come with me,

I’ll show you.”

That’s how I became the girl I am today.

Lila Blau, Age 8

These lines from the exhibit demonstrate exactly what the killer pilots in Aleppo are tragically blind to, namely, the uniquely human capacity to imagine the lives and conditions of others with accurate empathy, what Walt Whitman meant when he wrote “What I assume, you shall assume,/ For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”

But one does not need to be a poet to exercise his or her metaphorical imagination, that is, to see him or herself in others, as well as in natural objects, just as Lila, Ella, Frida and Samuel have in their poems above. The kind of moral calculus that inspires the metaphorical equations evident in these children’s poems testifies to a transpersonal self that apprehends what Ralph Waldo Emerson called the “unifying instinct” in nature, a complex self that crosses over from one to another. The poet Elizabeth Bishop recalls doing just this in her poem “In the Waiting Room” where she as a child of six hears her Aunt Consuelo moan with pain in the dentist’s office and in so doing awakens to her capacity of becoming another while simultaneously becoming conscious of herself as an “I”:

… you are an I,

you are an Elizabeth,

you are one of them.

Why should you be one, too?

I scarcely dared to look

to see what it was I was.

Without remembering these epiphanic moments from our childhood, adults grow increasingly prone to losing their transpersonal imaginations, which is why when the most egregious acts of cruelty occur it is incumbent upon citizens around the world, whether they’re poets or not, to witness to that which has compromised our common humanity. The simplest truthful words will do, especially now as our country experiences dangerous polarization and divisiveness in the wake of the recent election.

In the silence of the lost children of Aleppo, what to say or write in memoriam? How to respond to that silence that should have been filled with the wisdom no adult can get too much of? Each adult must answer this question on his or her own in prose or poetry or in the silence of his or her own contemplation.

Meanwhile, the transformative chorus of children continues to sing its irrepressible, human song around the world. Those who refuse to listen risk growing inhuman, like those pilots who targeted the schools and homes of Aleppo.

Chard deNiord is Vermont’s poet laureate. He lives in Westminster West.