Jane Hirshfield (b. 1953) was born in New York, went to Princeton, has published seven books of poetry as well as essays and translations and anthologies, aiming in these last to help recover the history of women’s writing. She received lay ordination in Soto Zen in 1979, and has taught at numerous academic institutions. “A profound empathy for the suffering of all living beings,” wrote Czeslaw Milosz; “. . . it is precisely this I praise in the poetry of Jane Hirshfield.”
Every anthology has a final piece, which in being its final piece contributes something to its overall shape. This one ends with Hirshfield’s “I Cast My Hook, I Decide to Make Peace,” from her book The Beauty, published in 2015. It is among the anthology’s least dogmatic works, with little to say, even indirectly, about ongoing wars in Afghanistan, or Syria, or the Ukraine, or weapons of mass destruction (ours or theirs), or defense budgets, or the substantial legacies of the American antiwar tradition. Indeed the peace the speaker decides to make, abandoning such certainties to cast her hook, may occur entirely as a matter of individual mood. (In this, it is like the war Paul Reps stops, “drinking a cup of tea” in his poem on page 330.)
Yet from an unresponsive world—with little more than some imagination, patience, and “a little ink”—the poet makes something joyous, dramatizing the immense consequences of a simple change of heart. It may be, as W. H. Auden once said, that “poetry makes nothing happen”; but for Hirshfield as for the other antiwar and peace writers gathered here, the blank page has seemed like a place to try.
The bee does not speak to me.
The whale does not speak to me.
The horse is silent.
History does not speak to me.
Arachne is only a spider.
Nothing says “you” if I offer “I,”
“I” if I proffer “you.”
to the Counter of Complaining—
there was one,
a hut of new pine wood
at the base of the Yellow Mountains in China,
the door was open, a woman sat in the chair—
but nothing says “counter,”
nothing says “yellow” or “mountain.”
Erased dust of the chalkboard, barnacle,
less sleep than bed—
what can I do, faceless, with no one to kiss or shout at?
I cast my hook, my vote against it,
I decide to make peace.
I declare this intention but nothing answers.
And so I put peace in a warm place, towel-covered, to proof,
then into an oven. I wait.
Peace is patient and undemanding, it surpasseth.
And the bulldozers move
from the palace of breaking to the places of building.
And the students return to their classes.
Tuna swim freely.
The sky hoists the flag of the sky.
All this in the space of a half-page, a little ink,
a small bite of hubris
sweetened with raisins and honey.
I begin to consider what I will make of tomorrow’s speechless.