But it seems there’s still plenty of potency left in those two words and four syllables to describe today’s world four years after the COVID threat has faded.
Other worrisome things have arrived to needle us with anxiety like the cost of living, rising fuel prices, war, AI and hate speech.
These have arrived on top of the general anxieties we all live with like illness, family strife and loss.
Some people are lucky and don’t think too much about the world.
They just get on with things and pay the bills.
Others, like me, need a quiet place of shelter to process what’s happening, get through the storm, past the darkening skies and move on to the blue horizon.
In these situations, the well-crafted word is always my first port of call.
For others, it might be a rowdy footy match, a vigorous bout of gardening, or a mind-numbing street fight outside a pub after chuck-out time.
Good luck to them — whatever gets you through the night.
The phrase “poems can be amulets against the darkness” belongs to Canadian-American writer Molly Peacock.
For me, it perfectly sums up the healing power of well-chosen words to help ward off encroaching darkness and to sit with complex emotions.
I sometimes try to memorise my favourite poems and phrases to use on bushwalks or to prevent me phone scrolling in idle moments.
This week, online newspaper The Conversation asked five Australian wordsmiths for the poems they turn to in anxious times for comfort or company.
There were some interesting choices, such as Gerard Manley Hopkins’ God’s Grandeur and Sarah Holland-Batt’s The Art of Disappearing.
However, the choice of Australian poet and academic Aidan Coleman has stuck with me.
He recommends a short poem called The Peace of Wild Things by Kentucky farmer and environmentalist Wendell Berry.
It’s become a favourite, and I think I’ll add it to my arsenal of amulets.
It contains these lines:
I go and lie down where the wood drake,
Rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things,
Who do not tax their lives with forethought,
Of grief.
You can read the complete poem here: https://tinyurl.com/48hmvk5h
Over a lifetime, I’ve compiled a list of get-me-through pieces of writing that remind me of the beauty, the mystery and the nonsense of being human.
On my list are the closing lines of James Joyce’s The Dead with its repetitive lines of snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling.
Then there’s the opening lines of Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood with its “sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea”.
I love the simple imagery and rhythms of John Masefield’s Sea Fever– “I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky”.
And I can’t go past the fidgety madness of Bob Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues: “Johnny’s in the basement/Mixing up the medicine/I’m on the pavement/Thinking about the government.”
There’s plenty more on my list, but I won’t bore you.
I’d love to know what’s on your list of get-me-through-the-night writings.
You can send them to editor@sheppnews.com.au
John Lewis is a former journalist at The News.
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