Why Do Birds Sing After It Rains?
I think it’s true of any writing, but especially poetry, that to go beyond mere appreciation or even superficial enjoyment, to find a way inside a work and inhabit it, the reader needs to meet the writer where she’s at. That is, as much as anything we read isn’t about us, we’re naturally wired to do that very thing, to say, “What does this say about me?” rather than, “How does what this says make me feel?” I think that’s why we tend to gravitate toward what makes us comfortable.
Assuming there’s guilt to be assigned, and I don’t think there is, I’m as guilty as the next person of opting for comfort over confrontation. But it’s good to step out of that comfort zone and put yourself in a place where you can become emotionally vulnerable. It’s one of the ways we create empathy, and poetry is particularly effective at doing so—by stimulating specific brain regions involved in language and emotional processing, similar to areas linked with human empathic behavior; by using compressed language, rhythm, and metaphor to jolt readers out of their own perspectives; and by condensing complex human struggles into intense emotional snapshots, allowing readers to “feel into” a writer’s subjective reality. Literally literary empathy.
I didn’t set out to get philosophic or scientific, but thinking about fellow Open Mic Poetry Night poet Rachel McBride’s first poetry collection has me venturing down such roads. Had I not known her, though it pains me to say it, there is little chance I would have picked up this book. Not because I would otherwise never have heard of it, though that too, but because the book’s obsentible subject matter—a miscarriage—lives somewhere past the edge of that personal comfort zone. I’m not alone in that discomfort: Miscarriage is still largely considered taboo, not just in social and medical circles, but in literary contexts, too.
In Why Do Birds Sing After It Rains?, McBride confronts that loss and its aftermath head-on, giving voice to her reproductive trauma with grace, with enduring faith, with love. (It is ironic that, after meeting her the first time or two, I misremembered her name as Grace, and she later named her daughter Anne, which means “grace” in Hebrew.) But this is not merely a book about miscarriage any more than Moby-Dick is about hunting a giant white whale. No, as she writes in the opening Note, it is “a testament to survival, to the unseen journeys many endure, and to the possibility of finding beauty in sorrow.”
One of the things I love about poetry is that it gives us a way to hold or carry what often feels unbearable. Though we may write through trauma, writing itself is not therapy. In many ways, it does something more. A poem creates a space for care—for both writer and reader—that, though there may be devastation, there is hope, too. Throughout, McBride does this with stunning delicacy and touch, perhaps no better than in the collection’s eponymous and final poem, which is something like a ghazal:
The sound carries easily,
ricocheting off dripping leaves, broken branches.
Food rises to the surface,
nourishing mind and body, ready for the taking.
After sheltering, a voice must reclaim
what is true, what endures.
Even birds sing with relief—
a joyous celebration of the storm’s passing.
Singing is a way to tell others:
we survived.
May we all give voice to our sorrow, and may we all, in the process, find peace on the other side.
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