Poem a Day

Caught As We Are

Caught as we are in the human condition —

Subject to vices variously begun —
in curiosity, from nature, or malaise.

Hungry for joy and fed less than our hunger

Charitable when we can save ourselves
from more involvement than we know how to bear.

Simple in our silences, made intricate by vocabularies.
Greedy because we were all once children.

Forgoing because we have read dreams and visions
that do not come to us when we lay the book by.

Loving in desperation, in fear of loneliness.

Begetting in the arsons and Olympics of first love
or in the habituated rutting of the long bed
the children that sadden us to an uneasy tolerance.

Afraid of death in our dying and liberated
only partially by the partial loss of ignorance.

Eager for friendships from which we may demand
what we ourselves give with two motives, if at all.

Suspected by States for our best intuitions.

Solemn at funerals but glad to have outlived
one other as proof that we are, after all, right.

Liars because we must live in what seems possible.

Fools because we lie, and fools again for assuming
the possible to be any more likely than the impossible.

Faithless because our houses are destroyable but not our fears.

Brave because we dare not stop to think. Proud
because we are wrong. Wrathful because we are powerless.

Envious because we are uncertain. Lazy because we were born.

Avaricious because we are afraid. Gluttonous
because bellies are a mother to warm and assure us.

Murderous and adulterous because opportunity and energy
will sometimes be added to motive. Ungrateful
because gratitude is a debt, and because it is easier
to betray our benefactors than to await new benefactions.

Religious because it is dark at night, and because
we have been instructed, and because it is easier to obey
than to believe our senses or to learn to doubt them
exhaustively. Sad because we are as we are,
time-trapped, and because our images of ourselves
and the facts of ourselves wake at night and bicker
and lay bets with one another, with us as the stakes.

Then moved to pity at last because we hear and are saddened

Nearly beautiful in the occasions of our pity not of
ourselves. Nearly affectionate when we are free of pain.

Caught as we are in these and our other conditions —

Which include a distaste for the littleness of our motives,
and, therefore, some wish to live toward some reality.

Terrified by realities. Addicted to evasions. Daring, perhaps
once, to look into the mirror and see and not look away.

Beginning again, then, with those who share with us and
with whom we share the sorrows of the common failure.

Fumbling at last to the language of a sympathy
that can describe, and that will be, we are persuaded,
sufficiently joy when we find in one another its idioms.

Caught as we are in these defining conditions —

I wish us the one fact of ourselves that is inexhaustible
and which, therefore, we need not horde nor begrudge.

Let mercy be its name till its name be found.

And wish that to the mercy that is possible because it takes
nothing from us and may, therefore, be given indifferently,
there be joined the mercy that adds us to one another.

-John Ciardi