Small Ode to Un-Earth
There, roots are
Revealed
While
Branches are hidden
There shadows are
Richer
Than substance
Land where each
Hourglass
Is reversed
And the sands
Of your life
Travel toward birth.
Un-Earth: A Sequence
Un-earth (verb): to dig up, to disinter, to
find out what’s down there.
Un-earth (noun): usage: “I wandered Un-Earth all my days. No, to be precise—all my nights.”
Wouldn’t it be boring if this was our only world
And everything we knew was based
On what we endured here—
What happened to us
Or what they taught us in school?
This much I’ve gathered from all I’ve
Been through: what wisdom
Un-Earth has to share isn’t stored in libraries—
It’s down there mixed with the molder
And bones
And the only way to learn it
Is to earn it yourself by digging down
Into the buried
Past—not just the world’s but your own.
*
Of course, our loved dead live there— those
Who visit in dreams— but also
The Illustrious: those who completed
Their mortal span and
For some reason or other
Are still respected by us,
Probably for something they said or did,
The sort of thing that might cause us
To occasionally pause mid-conversation
And remark:
“But remember what
Old So-and-So, the philosopher said,”
And before we know it we’ve hauled up
Another apt nugget stored for centuries in Un-Earth.
*
When I was a child and my mother saw
My bedside light on late at night
She often said: “What on earth
Are you doing up at this ungodly hour?”
I never told her but I was exploring
Un-Earth. I’d learned the ancient
Egyptians believed the sun (that golden
disk) having set in the west, glided
Each night on a barge over
Subterranean demon-infested waters
To arrive in the east again by dawn.
One more perilous night-journey
Through the heart of Un-Earth.
One of their un-gods poled the barge.
Pedagogy of Trauma
or An Account of What I Learned
That which is creative must create itself
Keats
I was just a kid trying to construct
an ego out of some material
as laughable as plastic bricks.
I hadn’t gotten past the foundation
and part of the first floor
when Kablam! it was smashed to bits.
If there really is such a thing as “the Story
Of Your Life” then in mine
Early chapters were full
Of violent shocks:
My younger
Brother’s death, there in the field
As we hunted, me holding the gun;
My mother, a few years later,
Coughing her heart out
And dying overnight
In the dark in another country.
*
Society told my parents what to do
With their dead child:
Bury him.
A more
Complicated problem:
What to do with the kid
Who was still alive
The one
Who (accidentally)
Killed the other
Who was his brother?
Such an awkwardly
Awful question.
No one nearby had
A ready answer
Nor could the survivor
Help himself
Because he couldn’t speak,
And only I can explain
His silence:
He believed
He was underground,
Buried
Beside his brother
But without
Benefit of coffin
So grave dirt blocked his mouth.
*
That anguished talk I longed
To have with my mother
After my brother’s death—
One where I begged forgiveness—
It never happened, and it wasn’t
Long before her own grief
And guilt were killing her—
Defeated at thirty-six, she had no
Wish to live.
But I was a kid and I did.
*
Having been raised within a loud
Shout of the Bible
I knew its stories cold.
Wasn’t it obvious I myself
Was Cain?
It was an awful job,
But at least I had a function:
Giving mythic horror
A local face and a local name.
Still not a single soul in my village
Ever so much as spoke of it—
My brother’s death.
They all lived on around me
As if nothing at all had gone wrong.
*
When I drove south alone, at eighteen,
Over eight hundred miles
I finally had a purpose.
It was 1965.
Who knew I’d spend
More time in various jails
Than organizing?
In Jackson that June
I saw black women, kids, old people
Beaten viciously with clubs.
I was, too.
It was all just a part of the Movement.
Ideals brought me there, but also
Something more darkly obscure:
Martyrdom’s lure—
If I really was,
As I suspected, kin to Cain
Wouldn’t a good death partly clear my name?
*
Later that summer, safely North,
I took part in demonstrations
And anti-war marches
But my heart wasn’t in it anymore
And I knew exactly where it was,
My heart:
It was trapped in a cell
In that violent Alabama hamlet
Where I’d spent a week
In solitary
And something in me had snapped.
Since then, I’d known the truest
Sources of my anguish
Were still locked up deep inside me.
*
There’s a smart-aleck remark
Favored by long-ago cardsharps:
“Read ‘em and weep.”
When I hear it
I don’t think of poker or even
(as metaphor) the hand life dealt me—
Instead, I remember poems I discovered
When I first got to college.
They were nothing really but
Certain rhythmic phrases certain poets
Had arranged on a page—
reading them,
I did.
And I felt relief, release.
These poems are from We Interrupt This Broadcast, Orr’s fourteenth collection, which W.W. Norton will publish in 2026. He recently retired from the University of Virginia where he taught for forty-six years.
*
According to the old tales, they stole
From the gods in order to bring us
Mortals essential gifts—
Culture heroes like Anansi and Prometheus.
What gift more precious than words
In poems and songs?
When I was young
And miserable, hanging by a thread,
Less alive than dead, writing saved me.
We start to free ourselves from inner
And outer oppression
By placing on the page all that’s silent inside us:
“To name our world in our words,”
As Paolo Freire said.
Or Emerson: “A man is only
Half himself, the other half is his expression.”
To which I, a non-believer, can only say “Amen.”
*
And you, my ancient bruises and wounds,
Time to admit
In a sense I’m deeply grateful to you:
You taught me not all hurt
Permanently harms
And some disasters
