Sometimes it does seem poetry is an obsolete activity, which gets me to questioning its social function (must it have a social function?) and the very question makes me despair. Although much of the poetry generated in response to current politics seems juvenile to me, lately I have come across some poems that seem indispensible to our culture and that are profoundly moral. As a not-so-moral person or poet, this makes me quiver. Is it all right if morality is not part of my kit bag? Why can't I lend my shoulder to pulling the sledge of justice? A despair deja vu, and the last was barely over.



Still, here is a Jack Gilbert poem, from the New Yorker of all places, that blew my mind. Its construction tackles all my aforementioned shorthanded qualms by sneaking up behind them.



A Brief for the Defense



Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies

are not starving someplace, they are starving

somewhere else. With flies in their nostils.

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.



I have tried to figure out if this poem is facetious--I suppose it both is and is not.



Now there are machine guns mounted on rafts that circle below my house, and today the warplanes flew with much clamor overhead.