The Occupation by Robert Bringhurst

The Occupation

by Robert Bringhurst

for Janet Danielson

I will tell you how it was the world

changed, she said --and darkness

wrapped us round.

I heard her clearly, though I barely

heard the words. It was nearly--yes--

as if she were singing.

Our job, she was saying, is not

to change the world--nor even

to keep it from changing.

No, she was saying (the story

was over already): our only

job is being changed.

This poem, by a Canadian poet (actually, an ex-pat American), seems particularly necessary today. In America, gun violence is literally a daily occurrence. There are apparently those citizens who barely even register mass shootings here anymore. But in other countries where guns are restricted and mass killings are rare, the shock and dismay are national.

But this poem was written long before yesterday's horrific gun deaths in Canada, or the terrible deaths of protestors in the U.S., or the deaths of people in detention centers in the U.S.. And the poet kept the specifics as to "an event" out of the poem, because the poem is not about just one horrible thing (or, if it is a response to one event, the poet wisely chose to write it so that it can pertain to many such periods of darkness).

The speaker listens to a story-teller, someone so good at her storytelling that the speaker claims she sounded, "as if she were singing."

We are not privvy to the actual story, the one mentioned in the first stanza that will explain how "darkness/wrapped around us." The story is not the point of this poem; the point is how we survive that darkness.

For this story-teller, accirding to the poem's speaker, change is key. But not preventing change or creating change, but from letting ourselves be changed, from allowing that darkness to change us somehow.

I resisted this when I first read this poem, but I am starting to come around. What do you think?

You can read more of Bringhurst's poetry on this website; you can even hear him read this poem there by clicking on the title. His Selected Poems from Copper Canyon Press can be purchased here. The Tree of Meaning from Penguin Random House can be bought here.