In Defense of Sadness
Sadness is not the same as sorrow,
melancholy, woe
or despair.
Sadness is sweeter than its synonyms.
When Issa writes,
this dewdrop world
is but a dewdrop world,
and yet…
sadness is the ellipsis.
//
The gods owe their lot to sadness.
It inspires most devotion.
It is why my nephew prays
for his life to be different.
It is not enough to ask.
//
I try my best to imitate my father’s sadness—
the way he holds the meat
beneath his shoulders, the way
it lets him withdraw
into the grayness of his eyes.
//
In sadness we trust
is a phrase I made a stamp of.
I press it above my signature
on the postcards of cathedrals
and holy places I send my friends.
//
How much of sadness is hereditary?
And how much do we discover on our own?
//
My father lost his sadness
when my sister died
and that’s when things got bad.
Without the foundation of sadness,
the heart caves in. It does not seek
the antidotes to suffering
which sustain it.
//
Hummingbirds are drawn to our sadness
the way they are drawn
to red petals.
//
What if teachers taught children
about the texture of their sadness?
How they can hurl it
like a boomerang and let it return,
or spin it like a top on the tips
of their fingers.
How it thrives in stillness,
and is not the same as pain.
//
In winter, my father’s sadness used to bloom
like lupine on the costal prairie.
Once I saw a coyote nibbling the petals
and thought, I want a taste.
//
Some plants pollinate themselves, but mostly
it’s the work of insects, birds,
bats and wind. Which is to say,
I must rely on others.
I cannot withdraw
into the grayness of my eyes.
//
The night before he takes the SAT,
my nephew, alight on Adderall,
asks me to explain allusion vs. illusion, again.
Upstairs, his stepmother scrolls
alone in her room.
//
In another translation of Issa’s poem,
there is no ellipsis:
A world of dew,
And within every dewdrop
A world of struggle.
Here, sadness is the line break
after dewdrop,
it is the pause
that animates the longing
which impels us.
//
Antidotes to suffering—
even though my parents hardly spoke
and slept in separate rooms,
each July, they shook the branches
of the plum tree in our yard, together.
Rich, sticky, we gorged
what we could manage.
//
I fly home to give my dad
some of my sadness.
But it doesn’t work that way.
Sadness is not marrow.
It is bone.
//
I will sew your shroud,
sadness, and bury your rodent bones
beneath the springtime of an apple tree.
Neruda writes,
but to bury is to buttress,
to sew shut is to enshrine the sound
of small claws scratching,
scratching inside the walls
of the skull.
//
The room my father slept in:
Just a stack of records
and a day bed
beneath a print of Manet.
Sometimes, through the door jamb
I’d watch him weeping,
I’d watch all the different lives
he might have led
mingle in the room.
//
We walk on the roof of hell
gazing at flowers,
Issa says.
Sadness, bend us
down to the petals,
to the plum
pits, to the brushstrokes
of the paintings
our fathers loved.
//
When my sister died, the colors ran
in my sadness.
So many hummingbirds appeared
when I walked in any garden.
I put my faith in them.
My sadness was my nectar
and they drank of me.
They drank and I sustained them.
Benjamin Gucciardi’s first book, West Portal, (University of Utah Press, 2021), was selected by Gabrielle Calvocoressi for the Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry. His poems appear in AGNI, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, Poetry and elsewhere.