Poetry

Ellen Bass has published several poetry collections, including Mules of Love, a Lambda Literary Award winner; The Human Line, a San Francisco Chronicle Notable Book; Like a Beggar; and Indigo (Copper Canyon Press, 2020). She coedited one of the first anthologies to highlight feminist poetry, the groundbreaking No More Masks! Her nonfiction books include the best-selling The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse, translated into ten languages. Among her many awards are three Pushcart Prizes and the Pablo Neruda Prize. A chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Bass teaches in the MFA writing program at Pacific University.

Photograph by Irene Young.

Listening and Other Poems

by Ellen Bass


Listening

Once I heard a poet talk about the friend
to whom John Keats first read “Ode to Autumn.”
That would be the greatest human experience,
he said, to have been the one to hear it.

I couldn’t help but think then—not about poetry,
but of the lives I once listened to,
stories that had never before been spoken:
children choking on flesh forced
into their throats . . . children left veined
with terror . . .


Those words had been capped and sealed in their bodies,
jar after jar lined up in the cellar.
Or, thinking of Keats, maybe I could dare
to say the words were like wine, because
sometimes the telling was exquisite—not
pleasure, of course. Nothing like that.
But maybe you have tasted the lucid
breath of such unburdening,
maybe you can understand the trance
of this much trust.
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