Beatitude: Poet John Keene’s Spell Against Despair

How do we live whole in a breaking world? It helps to bless what is simply for being. It helps to thank everything for its unbidden everythingness. And still we need help — help holding on to the beauty amid the brutality, help stripping the armors of certainty to be complicated by contraction and more tenderly entire with one another, help seeing the variousness of the world more clearly in order to love it more deeply.

The help of a lifetime comes from John Keene’s poem “Beatitude” — a poem partway between mantra and manifesto, a protest in the form of prayer, a spell against indifference, broadening Amiri Baraka’s instruction to “love all things that make you strong” and deepening Leonard Cohen’s instruction for what to do with those who harm you, carrying the torch Whitman lit when he urged us to “love the earth and sun and the animals” and every atom of one another, all the while speaking in a voice entirely original yet sonorous with the universal in us. It is read here to the accompaniment of Zoë Keating’s perfect “Optimist.”

BEATITUDE
by John Keene

Love everything
Love the sky and sea, trees and rivers,
      mountains and abysses.
Love animals, and not just because you are one.
Love your parents and your children,
      even if you have none.
Love your spouse or partner,
      no matter what either word means to you.
Love until you create a cavern in your loving,
      until it seethes like a volcano.
Love everytime.
Love your enemies.
Love the enemies of your enemies.
Love those whose very idea of love is hate.
Love the liars and the fakes.
Love the tattletales and the hypercrits, the hucksters and the traitors.
Love the thieves because everyone has thought
      of stealing something at least once.
Love the rich who live only to empty
      your purse or wallet.
Love the poverty of your empty coin purse or wallet.
Love your piss and sweat and shit.
Love your and others’ chatter and its proof of the expansiveness
      of nothingness.
Love your shadows and their silent censure.
Love your fears, yesterday’s and tomorrow’s.
Love your yesterdays and tomorrows.
Love your beginning and your end.
Love the fact that your end is another beginning,
      or could be, for someone else.
Love yourself, but not too much
      that you cannot love everything and everyone else.
Love everywhere.
Love in the absence of love.
Love the monsters breeding
      in every corner of the city and suburb,
      all throughout the soil of the countryside.
Love the monster breeding inside you and slaughter him
      with love.
Love the shipwreck of your body, your mind’s
      salted garden.
Love love.

“Beatitude” comes from the elixir that is Keene’s Punks: New & Selected Poems (public library). Couple it with Ellen Bass’s kindred ode to the courage of tenderness, then revisit George Saunders on how to love the world more and Rumi on the art of choosing love over not-love.