What's the point?

What poetry, even King David's, is good for is the bracing and blessed reminder that even in our darkest moments we're not as alone as we might believe. The human experience includes darkness so thick it's hard to believe others can have any idea how it feels to be on our knees. Poetry reminds us, in small and sometimes lovely ways, that there is a crowd of witnesses who know. They do. We're not alone.

Kim Stafford's "What For" showed up a couple of days ago, courtesy of the Writers Almanac. Goes like this:

What is beauty for—
sunset searing my soul
without thought or plan?

Why should beauty simply show up in our lives? in a couple of lonely corn stalks along the side of road on a gloomy January morning? What's the point of sunsets or dawns? of wonderfully sweet honey? of stones that get polished into luxury by the pounding sea?

Dawn green beauty, bee hum honey,
stone in hand so silky the long sea
worked centuries to ravish?

What's the point of beauty. For that matter, what's the point of pain? 

And what for pain—thorn
in heart for my hurt child,
dumb ache for my brother gone

thirty years, slow burn of disgrace
when I fail at what I am to do: to see
my country bruised and torn?

No matter what it's source--why is there pain? What's the point?

She pages through her own catalogue of human experience, from the blessings of beauty to the despair of war, from a handful of smooth stones to years--even lifetimes--of grief. What's it all for? Why am I here? What's the point?

A simple answer:

So, to make good things—
a song, a kind act, a friendship—
feed on beauty at every turn.

Okay, that's not bad. Had she stopped right there, after a stanza that begins like a sermon, with a so or a thusly or therefore, the poem might work up a smile, but not quite convince: "to make good things." If the poem stopped right there, it'll pass as a Hallmark card. 

But it doesn't end there:

And to make truth, feed on sorrows,
gnash their salty structures,
bite the bitter rind.

Can we really "make truth," can we ring joy from sorrow? Like it or not, she hints, it's what we do. It's our job, our calling, our mission: to wring truth and joy from "the bitter rind." That's the point. The writer's job--and all of ours really--is to make sense of it, to "make truth."

It's not the first q and a of the Westminster Catechism, but, in a way, I can't help thinking it is.