You Better Be Lightning (Button Poetry)

by Andrea Gibson

I know most people try hard to do good and find out too late they should have tried softer.

beauty is in the eye of anyone who sees what’s missing but can’t stop pointing to what’s still there.

Thank goodness for you, champion of the unkillable YES, dandelion refusing to be cut for the bouquet.

I will refuse to call it heaven if the people I love (who put me through hell) aren’t there.

And no, it is not the weak who try to clock out early. It’s people who are desperate to go home.

To make up for lost time, you need only to put down the grudge you are holding so you can pick up the phone and say, How many days did we need each other at the same time without knowing it? Bitterness is the easiest way to leave this world having had only a near-life experience.

Regret is a time machine to the past. Worry is a time machine to the future. Gratitude is a time machine to the present.

I sneak into fascist sleepovers and sharpie my pronouns onto the faces of senators who voted to criminalize my kisses when I was nineteen.

I walk through graveyards with a chisel correcting the names of trans kids whose families said, No, when asked, Can you just let me live?

Silence rides shotgun wherever hate goes.

If your wounds are still open, trust they are doors to an answer, and walk through.

anyone who asks you to hold your tongue is asking you to hold the heaviest thing in the galaxy.

If you are going to be anything in the world tonight, you better be lightning. You better find something in you honest enough to strike them.

the school principal gave me a gold ribbon and not a single bit of attitude about my radical political stance because neither he nor I knew it was political. Science had not yet been fully framed as leftist propaganda. The president did not have a Twitter feed starving the world of facts.

Why are the keys to our future in the hands of those who have the longest commutes from their heads to their hearts? Whose greed is the smog that keeps us from seeing our own nature and the sweetness we are here to protect?

None of that is poetry. It is just the earth being who she is in spite of us stamping barcodes on the sea. In spite of us acting like Edison invented daylight.

Dawn presses her blushing face to my window, asks me if I know the records in my record collection look like the insides of trees. Yes, I say,

Who, more than the earth, has bled for us?

How do we not mold our hearts after the first spruce tree who raised her hand and begged to be cut into piano keys so the elephants could keep their tusks?

Is the volcano that pours the mercury into the thermometers held under our tongues. The earth takes our temperature, tells us when we are too hot, even after we’ve spent decades denying her fever. Our hands held to her burning forehead, we insist she is fine while wildfires turn redwoods to toothpicks, readying the teeth of our apocalypse.

We need so much less than we take. We owe so much more than we give.

If we aimed to be just half as good as one of the earth’s mistakes, we could turn so much around. Our living would be seed, the future would have roots. We would cast nothing from the garden of itself. And we would make the thorns proud.

if your own story is one you aren’t sure you can survive, remove whatever sharpness you can from another person’s life.

Do you pray more now than you used to? I pray all the time. I pray to the Big Bang and to the Tiny Bang and to the bangs we’ll all have to cut ourselves so we can see what beauty can only be seen from six feet away.

If every heart-worthy novelist weeps for days before killing off a beloved character, god must have spent centuries sobbing before pressing a pen to the page of this year.

I’ll tell him karma is a hell of a feminist. I’ll tell him my silence was his worst bet.

my voice is alive and right now it is the only justice system I trust to ensure men like you understand the law of gravity, understand you will always be held down by what you held down.

Trauma was not being able to get the hands of the clock off me. Healing was learning no one has ever laid a fingerprint on the part of me that’s infinite.

love will still throw me over her shoulder and carry me up every story I’ve ever told myself so I can see what’s true, and what’s true is I can’t always tell the difference between my gifts and my tragedies.

what held me down and shut me up, what locked my voice box is also what taught me how to carve keys from poetry, and now my words are so good at coming to my own rescue, fire trucks pull over to let my voice through.

CONSTELLATIONS REARRANGE THEMSELVES INTO A PROTEST SIGN

Every uprising has the universe on their side. That’s not a horizon. That’s the earth drawing the line.

In any moment, on any given day, I can measure my wellness by this question: Is my attention on loving, or is my attention on who isn’t loving me?

A place where you are loved not for how well you sing but for your willingness to pick a song everyone will want to sing with you.

I don’t aim to be a person of note. I aim to be a person of whole journals filled with stories about hitchhiking the Atlantic coast.

Being born took courage, sir. I’m not gonna waste the daylight trying to darken seven-hundred tiny circles on a test just right.

On Earth, everyone loved butterflies, but I trusted the caterpillars more. I trusted the ones who knew they were not done growing.

A promised land is not a promised land if I can’t keep learning.

No one is going to win the human race—we are all going to lose unless something changes soon,

He was in bed, she says. My grandma was sitting beside him, holding his hand. He said the word, love. Then a few minutes later he said it again. And then he kept saying it: Love love love, over and over for hours. He said it for hours then kissed my grandma goodbye.

I’ve written so many poems in my life. And every single one of them was just trying to find a better way to say what one soul said to another soul with one word. Isn’t it amazing that I came up so short? Isn’t it everything that I tried so hard and failed to write a single thing more beautiful than love.