Another Veterans Day has come and gone. My country is yet again at war in the Middle East, a conflict with Iran that could have been avoided. Yet, troops were deployed, and 23 U.S. service members have died. There have been many more civilian deaths among the Iranians, including children the same age as mine. On Veterans Day, I was part of a poetry reading at the Plant in Pittsboro. I love this particular gathering because it brings together a diverse cast of friendly characters: ex-hippies and retired psychiatrists, UNC professors and folks from the hollers of the Appalachian Mountains. The poems are as diverse (and as weird and wacky, I say that with love) as the people. Everyone in the audience leans in and listens to each reader: “Hungover with joy like a Japanese poet at sunrise.” “The sun spreading its bony fingers over the hills.” “The dog carries the smell of rain through the door.” I love a dog poem. I read one of mine about picking up dog poop. Afterward, I got to talking with an elderly member of the audience. He’d been in the Army, then became a trucker, crisscrossing the country behind the wheel. Now, he walked with a cane and wore compression socks. He drank coffee, which I could smell on his breath as he shared stories from his career piloting the big rig on the open road, including that time he saw the ghost of a Native American riding a horse beside the highway in Wyoming. I was nervous when he unexpectedly veered into politics. But he’d listened to what I’d read from the lectern, and I felt like I owed him the same. He surprised me by vocalizing his support for the Palestinians—a people, he said, who have been “done wrong like the Indians here.” Language can divide us, but it can also foster connections. A reader at the Plant quoted Nietzsche: “We have art so as not to perish from truth.” I don’t think the German philosopher suggested that we need distractions but rather new ways of understanding the reality around us. I love a poem that casts new meaning on familiar words. At that reading, another poet shared, “Refuge is a holy place, and refugees are pilgrims.” Think of the difference that shift in perspective would make in today’s world. It’s a revelation like comparing the suffering of others across the world to the injustices in one’s country long ago. I shook my new friend’s weathered hand and walked out, as Brian Doyle wrote, “So full of hope I’m sure I spilled some at the door.”
Andrew Taylor-Troutman is the author of the book with Wipf and Stock Publishers titled This Is the Day: A Year of Observing Unofficial Holidays about Ampersands, Bobbleheads, Buttons, Cousins, Hairball Awareness, Humbugs, Serendipity, Star Wars, Teenagers, Tenderness, Walking to School, Yo-Yos, and More. He lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina where he is a student of joy.
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