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Unforgettable

By JACK GILBERT
Published December 25, 2005

	Special Report

A Brief for the Defense

By Jack Gilbert

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies

are not starving someplace, they are starving

somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.

But we enjoy our lives because that's what God wants.

Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not

be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not

be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women

at the fountain are laughing together between

the suffering they have known and the awfulness

in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody

in the village is very sick. There is laughter

every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,

and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.

If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,

we lessen the importance of their deprivation.

We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,

but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have

the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless

furnace of this world. To make injustice the only

measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.

If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,

we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.

We must admit there will be music despite everything.

We stand at the prow again of a small ship

anchored late at night in the tiny port

looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront

is three shuttered cafes and one naked light burning.

To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat

comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth

all the years of sorrow that are to come.

Jack Gilbert, 81, was born in Pittsburgh. He is the author of "The Great Fires: Poems 1982-1992; Monolithos," which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. "A Brief for the Defense" appears in his most recent collection, "Refusing Heaven," published by Knopf this year. He didn't write it with the year's events in mind, but we thought it was an interesting antidote to them. "I've been saying this for a long time," he said recently from his home in Northampton, Mass. "We're blessed that we're alive and conscious. People are finding all kinds of ways to be disheartened. We're the only thing in the entire universe that knows there is a spring coming on.

[Last modified December 22, 2005, 11:52:04]