Poetry in a Box

Good things come in boxes. Very different kinds of good things come in boxes.

For Valentine’s Day this year, TJ got me the box on the left. About a month later, he got me the box on the right.

To clear any confusion, the box on the left contained this.

The box on the right is something I have wanted for years, but Hurricane Helene was the final straw. Getting the whole-house generator installed took no less than seven visits by the gas company, HVAC guy, City of Greenville inspector, and a posse of electricians, plus two separate half-days of having the power turned off (the amount of anxiety this caused me highly affirmed the purchase of the generator). However, to have the power off in order to never have the power off again was worth it.

One of the planned power outage days was yesterday, which was also the day I was summoned to report as a juror for the West Greenville Summary Court. After I did some mental work and pushed through the anxiety surrounding the unknowns of what a jury summons entailed, I found the whole process of the jury selection super interesting.

In short, there were around fifty-five of us potential jurors in the courtroom and the judge did a roll call of each person there. We had to stand up, state our name, age, address, occupation, marital status, and spouse’s occupation if applicable. My attention was captivated to the nth degree. How interesting and varied human lives are! How competent are this many people to show up in the right place at the right time, even with those biting little bugs of phones we let invade our lives. Mind you, as we waited the initial forty-five minutes for the judge to enter the courtroom, I saw only a couple other people besides myself reading a book, but nevertheless, I felt hopeful upon realizing that our collective attention span isn’t so shot that we can’t open our mail, read a jury summons, follow directions, find parking, and show up en masse. I felt for these strangers what I’d almost call love.

After we all had our turn telling those bits of information about ourselves, the judge stated several reasons that people could be excused from duty (age 65 or older, personal acquaintance with any person involved in the case, or too deep of an emotional connection with the DUI charge being tried that the person couldn’t remain “fair and impartial,” as the judge kept reiterating.) Five people were dismissed in this manner, and then the selection process began.

A randomized list was generated by the computer and the judge went down the list reading the names in the order they were selected. If your name was called, you were to stand and wait for each of the attorneys to decide whether to approve or dismiss you as a juror. Sometimes one attorney would say yes and the other would say no. The no always trumped the yes. It took a dozen or so people being called before six jurors plus one alternate were given a yes by both attorneys. I was thankful and relieved to not have my name called from the randomized list and to be able to leave after that two-hour process was complete.

But it was a good two hours in that wood box of a courtroom. Strangely, I had a feeling of being safe and resting. I think it’s because I had just finished memorizing this poem last week:

I folded the paper in quarters and took it on my walks and worked on the poem line by line until I could say it all. It was easier to memorize than I thought it would be because the imagery in the poem made it easy to connect one line to the next in my mind. I just kept adding and adding and before long, I moved this box of poetry from a little slip of paper into my memory. I own the box and I can take it everywhere now.

I came across this quote the other day and it rings so true for me:

Reading a poem, memorizing a poem, reciting (silently or aloud) a poem you've memorized: all of these give me the feeling of my consciousness, my concentration, being gathered, knitted up; an expansion of the self but also a drawing of the self to a point. -Garth Greenwell

Learning this new poem has made me bigger and yet more compact. More myself, and more than myself. It helps me focus but it also helps me relax when I can let my mind drift again and again over the lines.

As I sat in the courtroom yesterday, I thought of it as the belly of the whale. The poem’s lines helped me remember that there are endless ways to fill the time if we can get past wishing we were somewhere else.

I was thankful to be in that place, just resting and waiting.