Donna Hilbert, Carry-On Poetry

A few days into a three-week vacation September 11, 2001, I was on a train with friends returning from a day-trip to Florence to the house we were sharing in Castellina in Chianti.  We had seen Michelangelo’s David, had a fine lunch with wine, and were laughing and talking amongst ourselves when an American woman sitting close-by said,  “Obviously, you haven’t heard the news.”

When I went to bed that night, after frantic phone calls home and hours of watching TV coverage in Italian, I longed for the consolation of poetry.  I wanted to say familiar words to myself as I fell asleep, but I could only bring up a few lines, incompletely remembered.  Among the half-remembered poems, were these words from Auden: About suffering, they were never wrong. / The Old Masters: how well they understood its human position; how it takes place/ while someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along. How perfectly those words captured our own obliviousness to what was going on across the Atlantic while we were having fun.

In the ten years and the many trips that have followed the horrid events of 9/11, the nature of travel has changed: fees for checked bags, intensive security, and limits to what we may carry on board.  I have come to believe that the most important items that I carry on as I travel are the words that comfort and guide me into the unknown, which is after all, the only place where any of us go, day after day, after day.  Here is a poem by Patti Wahlberg from the anthology SOLACE in so Many Words:

COMFORT

The day is safe so far

like coffee

cooling in a cup by the sink,

and nowhere to go—

only the constant

hum of a small airplane

in effortless flight, in sync

with the solid, droning life

of the hotel maid’s vacuum

in the hall. Comfort somehow

that we survive, for now,

in the three o’clock hour

of this passing afternoon.