you may open a door

Hello Friends,

Today’s poem by Matthew Olzmann is composed entirely in couplets, groups of two lines, except for one stanza that is only a single line. Olzmann disrupts the structure of his poem at this moment, exactly at the same spot in the poem where he invokes the epigraph from Czesław Miłosz, to create a fulcrum on which he pivots to referring to a “you.” It’s as if the “missing” line that would have made that stanza a couplet is instead you catching your breath to realize “you” is you in the doorway. Or, the “missing” line is one of those special doorways in poetry that allows our minds to open a door to “a meadow, or a eulogy.”

This is just one small example of using form or structure to convey meaning — the words mean more because of how they are arranged on the page. The use of form is one of the key characteristics that makes poetry bett—ur, different from prose.

Enjoy.
Ellen

---

Letter Beginning with Two Lines by Czesław Miłosz

You whom I could not save,
Listen to me.

Can we agree Kevlar
backpacks shouldn’t be needed

for children walking to school?
Those same children

also shouldn’t require a suit
of armor when standing

on their front lawns, or snipers
to watch their backs

as they eat McDonalds.
They shouldn’t have to stop

to consider the speed
of a bullet or how it might

reshape their bodies. But
one winter, back in Detroit,

I had one student
who opened a door and died.

It was the front
door to his house, but

it could have been any door,
and the bullet could have written

any name. The shooter
was thirteen years old

and was aiming
at someone else. But

a bullet doesn’t care
about “aim,” it doesn’t

distinguish between
the innocent and the innocent,

and how was the bullet
supposed to know this

child would open the door
at the exact wrong moment

because his friend
was outside and screaming

for help. Did I say
I had “one” student who

opened a door and died?
That’s wrong.

There were many.
The classroom of grief

had far more seats
than the classroom for math

though every student
in the classroom for math

could count the names
of the dead.

A kid opens a door. The bullet
couldn’t possibly know,

nor could the gun, because
“guns don’t kill people,” they don’t

have minds to decide
such things, they don’t choose

or have a conscience,
and when a man doesn’t

have a conscience, we call him
a psychopath. This is how

we know what type of assault rifle
a man can be,

and how we discover
the hell that thrums inside

each of them. Today,
there’s another

shooting with dead
kids everywhere. It was a school,

a movie theater, a parking lot.
The world

is full of doors.
And you, whom I cannot save,

you may open a door

and enter a meadow, or a eulogy.
And if the latter, you will be

mourned, then buried
in rhetoric.

There will be
monuments of legislation,

little flowers made
from red tape.

What should we do? we’ll ask
again. The earth will close

like a door above you.
What should we do?

And that click you hear?
That’s just our voices,

the deadbolt of discourse
sliding into place.

■