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Tell me what I don't know for sure

Cleopatra Mathis was the featured reader at the November Hoot. An award winning poet and author of six previous books, she read finely crafted, moving poems from her new book White Sea (Sarabande Books, 2005).

During the Open Mic portion of the evening, Rhonda Palmer read this poem:

Tell me what I don't know for sure

I am riddled with ignorance.
The holes in my world are large and overarching.
I am a honeycomb of the unknown.
I don't know how to explain leaps in evolution
Nor the parting of hearts.
There is no coherent explanation for the beginning
Of matter and time. Racism is a vast question,
As is the beating of babies and how whole peoples
Are abandoned and starved.
In the city of myself there are vast neighborhoods
That keep lock and key on the front gate and
Do not permit reconnaissance or exploration.
I am lured to these gates again and again,
As a mother to the empty cradle,
As a lover to the silent phone.
I am riddled with ignorance.
I am a honeycomb of the unknown.
This is what I know for sure.

                                     - Rhonda Palmer

The strength of this poem lies in its honesty, its proud yet vulnerable confession "I am riddled with ignorance." The Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska has written "…the little phrase 'I don't know' is small, but it flies on mighty wings. It expands our lives to include spaces within us as well as the outer expanses in which our tiny earth hangs suspended."

The poem is conveyed by a direct and declarative voice, with many end-stopped lines - lines that close with punctuation at the end of a grammatical unit. (Walt Whitman was a master of this style.) I especially like Rhonda's choice of the words "honeycomb," "riddled," "lured" and the similes in the next two lines. The rhythmic pleasure of the poem is enhanced by repetition of the first and third lines at the end and by the final line's echo back to the title - all of this gives a satisfying feeling of closure.

We share in the speaker's bewilderment about many things in the vast confusing world outside ourselves and the intimate mysteries "in the city of myself." In his 1976 Nobel Prize address novelist Saul Bellow said that "…the intelligent public … is waiting to hear from art what it does not hear from theology, philosophy, social theory, and what it cannot hear from pure science…[There is] an immense, painful longing for a broader, more flexible, fuller, more coherent, more comprehensive account of what we human beings are, who we are, and what this life is for."

                                                                      - Harvey Shepard
                                                                        (hshepard@gmail.com)

"Tell me what I don't know for sure" copyright 2005 by Rhonda Palmer. Rhonda, a hospice nurse on sabbatical, has been secretly writing poetry for years. She loves "hard" science fiction, Billy Collins and the smell of old books.

Please note: Poems submitted to this column should not exceed nineteen lines.


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