Featured poem: "Aware of Death"

Aware of Death

--Leslie Norris

At two-thirty in the morning I awoke choking,
Every fibre in my fur-lined lungs roaring
For relief of air, the room unhinged and bellowing
And the crazy window swimming in and out
Of two dabbed eyes. Take it easy, take it easy
Said my unseated reason. Or feeble courage, I don't know.
Like hell, I thought, like hell I'll take it easy.
I began to nurse the oxygen like a miser,
Controlled the rasping walls with a shrewd squint,
Tucked rasping panic into an obscure corner,
And found I was easier. My arms for example.
I had thought them wildly pummelling the night for breath,
But they were confident on two clasped fists of sheet,
Calmly supporting my racked and labouring body.
I pulled carefully with my mouth at the painful
Air. It was like drinking straight out of a cold tap.

And nothing like this had ever happened to me before.

Later I lay for twenty minutes by the cold moon
In a mental sweat of fever, yes, but as well of
Almost the final terror, my lungs boiling,
Tongue too big for talk, mouth
Tasting the body's bitter dissolution;
Aware of death.

Many times I feel a sense of familiarity or recognition when I read a good poem, even though the experience described is not one I have actually had. But the other night, an experience like this one happened to me---exactly, just like this---and immediately, though I haven't read it for a long time, fragments from this poem came into my head. So I went and got my book out---and there were Leslie Norris' words, as if they had been written specifically for the occasion.

(I don't know exactly what happened, or why---something to do with pregnancy and my lungs being all squished and a baby kicking me in the ribs and heartburn and vivid dreams and all those sort of things, no doubt. When Sam was in the worst of his whooping cough he had episodes like this several times a night. He thought he was going to die from panic alone, I think. It was awful to watch---and awful to experience as well, I find.)

Anyway, I find it amazing that so many of our human experiences are so universal---even the private, untold ones that feel quite personal and unique. And even more amazing that there are poets skilled enough to find the words to capture them---accurately enough that I can think: "this is ME, he must be talking about ME." It takes careful observation to write like that, of course, but also (in the best writers) I think there's a kind of sympathy and care for the feelings of others (which feelings, of course, are more like our own than we like to admit) that makes the writing succeed. Not just a sympathy for those viewpoints that we share, but a feeling of being in this together because we are all human. My favorite writers seem to have an awareness of and even enjoyment of our common frailties: rather than observing life smugly from "the outside," looking down on the miseries of humanity in a detached way, they write as as fellow-sufferers who understand, and sympathize even with the things they don't really understand.

Having known him, I know that Leslie Norris was that kind of person, of course. But I think many other good writers must be as well. I think of the way President Eyring and Elder Holland write, for example, and they always have that same sort of inclusiveness and humility, that sense of "we are all learning these things together"---and same with Helaman and other Book of Mormon writers. You can feel it in their words. I think that's why the words are so powerful.

And I think it brings up an interesting idea---that becoming a good writer (or a good speaker---or a good influencer of others in any way) is perhaps more rooted in becoming a good person---kind, charitable, sympathetic, humble---than it is in studying the craft itself. (Not that you wouldn't need to study the craft itself, of course.) And I guess there are plenty of talented writers that don't like people and aren't humble, etc. But I still am taken with the idea that perhaps I could be improving myself as a writer and thinker, even when I can't find the time to actually write and think as much as I'd like, just by working on noticing and sympathizing more with those around me. And maybe someday it will all have time to synthesize inside me and I'll be able to write and reflect and connect with others when I'm an old lady---even after I die. As this poem connected me again with Leslie Norris, even after he's been gone for three years.