‘The Opposites Game’
— Andrew Sargus Klein
It’s been difficult to muster the sort of energy and engagement needed to write about poetry. Yesterday saw the worst mass shooting in recent US history, with 59 people taken from their lives, and 527 injured. I say “recent” so as not to erase atrocities committed against indigenous peoples and slaves. An unmovable thread of American history is a history of such killings.
And so I’ve been gutted. I didn’t want to write about poetry today. But poetry found me, like it so often does, on Kaveh Akbar’s Twitter timeline. Sandwiched between a tweet pointing out the gross racism of newspaper headlines and something about the death of Tom Petty was the poem ‘The Opposites Game’ by Brendan Constantine.
Constantine’s poem centers children and a discussion of poetry that turns into a discussion of violence, and toward the end you find a line spread out like an uncrossable ocean:
The opposite of a gun is wherever you point it.
And so I found a new depth for the helplessness of the past 24 hours. I keep thinking about Las Vegas, about Orlando, about Newtown, about the innocent and the dead and the utter lack of compassion and urgency in large swaths of the American populace.
The opposite of a gun is wherever you point it.
The poem ends on an even more solemn note, if you can believe it. But I’m still meditating on that one line, letting it sink into me.