Those who sow in tears
shall reap with shouts of joy!
He who goes out weeping,
bearing the seed for sowing,
shall come home with shouts of joy,
bringing his sheaves with him.
As I read Rachel Hicks’s book of poems, Accumulated Lessons in Displacement, I kept thinking of the above lines from Psalm 126. While her poems, some in various forms and some in free verse, are constellated around stories of journeys and the distant places at such journeys’ ends, they all share notes of suffering, grief, and hope.
Hicks herself has been a global nomad throughout her life but now lives in Baltimore. Her voice is the voice of one who has travelled far and wide. As I read her work, I thought of the aesthetic that often accompanies travel writing or travel bloggers on social media: it is an aesthetic of independence and yearning and, frankly, luxury. This naïve wanderlust is nowhere to be found in Hicks’s work. Rather, her voice is that of a mature seeker, a seeker of hidden beauties and of home in a variety of places.
Her poems embody the hope that those who sow—or roam—in tears shall come home, and they shall do so with shouts of joy. Her faith is that, as she writes in “Sojourn,” the first poem of the collection, “The fullness awaits,” that we are “not yet what we shall be—light, and home.”
Accumulated Lessons in Displacement abounds with richly rendered images, such as those of brightly-colored fish, an altar of stones, the wings of a cicada. Mainly, however, Hicks’s images revolve around human life and sorrow.
Sorrows spin throughout the book: war, death, disease, grief. A girl running from but eventually succumbing to a tsunami, a baby with two months to live, an eight-year-old receiving an unwanted kiss from a “lecherous” man, Job in his old age remembering his former life and dwelling on his scars, a refugee in Sarajevo reliving unthinkable horrors, the next-door neighbor of Joseph and Mary kissing her son before the massacre she does not anticipate. A few lines at the end of the titular poem, “Accumulated Lessons in Displacement,” which tells the reflections of one presumably fleeing from war, represent this leitmotif of sorrow:
It makes no sense that a soldier can press a button
and somewhere a baby ignites into flame.
And he goes home and brushes his teeth.
What we do to each other, to other created souls.
Always I carry this burden, like a child on my hip.
The tenderness of carrying a burden “like a child on my hip” is everywhere in the collection, illuminating the darkness of sorrow. As the image of a child carried on a hip suggests, such tenderness, while representative of the hopeful gentleness that all image bearers can potentially display, seems to be particularly maternal. Reading Hicks’s poems, I was reminded of Jesus’ lament over Jerusalem in which he uses maternal language: “How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!”
That same urge toward maternal gathering is here in Accumulated Lessons in Displacement. In her poem about a baby with two months to live, Hicks writes, “I’m a cup running over with pity.” In “Philoxenia” she imagines the sorrowful past of a disheveled stranger in an airport and expresses a desire to embrace him. In other poems she writes of her daughter’s request to know her first kiss, of her daughter’s miraculous healing, and then the healing seemingly reversed, of her daughter eagerly eating walnuts given her by a fruit vendor, and of her own eagerness to respond to her daughter’s request for a pomegranate. And in the “slain” flesh of the pomegranate, she learns “how slow love is,” and what work it requires.
Pity, tenderness, eagerness to show love, and the slow work that love will require: these are fruitful ways in which humans should respond to suffering and sorrow, and they are the responses that Hicks offers in her poetry.
Yet there is only so much that maternal tenderness can accomplish. “Running over with pity” cannot save the diseased baby; embracing the unkempt stranger cannot resolve his unknown troubles; carrying the burden of war cannot bring the murdered innocents back to life. To attribute a salvific power to human emotion and love is to fall into the pit that holds many in our culture, the pit of exalting empathy above all other virtues and of honoring human potential as the highest spiritual force. As I wrote recently in these pages, such romantic humanism is evinced by many contemporary poets seeking to turn from the brokenness and frailty sung by modern and post-modern poets.
Hicks, fortunately, does not fall into this pit. Instead she expresses tenderness and empathy in their proper place but recognizes who it is who can truly save, who it is who causes the mournful farmer to “reap with shouts of joy.” Her faith in God and her longing for heaven are equally as evident (if not more so) in the collection as her maternal tenderness. Hicks compares God “writ[ing] our lives” to the way Dostoevsky wrote his stories. In one poem she imagines what various people around the world will be doing just before Christ’s return: tires spinning in the Sichuan mountains, jurors in the Baltimore civic court, shepherd boys in Amman, standing amazed. In others she meditates on Ash Wednesday.
In one of my favorite poems in the collection, “Melancholy,” Hicks acknowledges that the exile’s longing for home will be fulfilled in that “City with the trees—the ones with / golden leaves for our healing.” She imagines that those newly arrived in heaven will be refreshed and consoled by the golden leaves “when the melancholy pricks” but then will no longer need them.
In other words, healing is coming for the hurting ones who have hoped in the Lord. In other words, he who goes out weeping, bearing the seed for sowing, shall come home with shouts of joy.
In the meantime, we ought to wait and weep and remember and hope amid our journeys and our homes, as Hicks writes in “The Wood is Dry”:
Teach us to weep, to wake from sleep,
to think of you up on that hill.
The wood is dry, and everywhere
men beat their breasts and call for rocks to fall
and women cry and tear their hair;
yet hardly any turn to you; they all
would curse your name, give you the blame—
and drink the bitter cup of gall.
In the greenness of your return,
the parched ones, dry as sin, will be consumed.
And all that cannot last will burn,
and what was buried then will be exhumed.
Whose love remains in spite of pain
will rise like flames to be with you.
Image Credit: Mary Cassatt, “On a Balcony” (1878-79) via the Art Institute of Chicago.
