Salvation in a Torrent of "Thanks"

So already, poetry as torrent. And thank you as defiance, as refusal. Not a distressed person's search for one small, sweet reason to make it through another difficult day, but an angry person's refusal to let a crazy, callous, sometimes vicious world demean living and people.* Better than that, an angry group's determination to meet a flood of indifferent--or not indifferent--trouble with a torrent of passionate thanks.

That's what we find in W.S. Merwin's "Thanks." I suggest that you read it, then listen to Busy Philipps read it (at Minute 1:01:05), and even talk about it before she reads it (at Minute 55:34): it was one of the final poems read during the American Academy of Poets' "Shelter in Poems" virtual reading event on April 30, 2020.

The poem begins pretty gently, as we each take our places, the vantage points from which we will look and speak:  

Listen
with the night falling we are     saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water thanking it
standing by the windows looking out
in our directions**

Wow! W.S. Merwin's not Jewish, but this poem felt so Jewish to me the first time I heard it, and it still does: we--not just "I," but "we"--say thank you, we praise together, again and again and again, even, or maybe especially, when we are grieving or otherwise losing heart. It's a group effort to keep it real--that is, feel the terrible loss--and to assert thank you to God or the universe--or even simply to one another--as our response, to be undeterred in our stance of thankfulness for being alive and together. The poem begins with the word "Listen"; by the end of the poem we are still saying thank you to those others who ignored us when we entreated them to listen at the beginning of the poem, and who are not listening:

with the animals dying around us
our lost feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is

We say "thank you" no less than fourteen times in this poem, even if we're the only ones listening to ourselves say it. Even though terrible things keep happening. Whether our repetitions have any ability to restore to us our lost feelings--the ones we once could feel that have been somehow trampled into actual or seeming non-existence--I don't know.

The combination of our group effort and the music of our chant empowers us. And what starts as a trickle of thank yous becomes a torrent, a cascade. We don't say thank you because we got something--like justice or a better world,*** or any kind of reward for saying thank you. We say thank you because we refuse not to say it. Because we mean it, and aim to mean it even more. Because we mean to live and affirm life no matter how thick the darkness is.

I've been paying attention to repetition in poetry. Sometimes it calms and lulls us; sometimes it galvanizes us; and sometimes it chips away at something in us that needs transformation. The world resists changing, Merwin tells us; we can count on it only to serve up its same old menu of ignorance and pain. But we can refuse to be defined and undone by the featured items on the menu, pandemics included.

* https://www.merrimentdesign.com/image/chicago_avenue_bridge_graffiti_thank_you_card_6.jpg

** Adjacent photo is the photo in this blog post: Hill, R. (2017, October 1). A childhood prayer [Web log post]. Retrieved from https://russellhillwriter.wordpress.com/2017/10/01/a-childhood-prayer/

*** Post-Apocalyptic City Scene 4 - DreamScene [Live Wallpaper ... https://i.ytimg.com/vi/i1NvgAy3uSA/maxresdefault.jpg