Let Them Not Say

By Jane Hirshfield

Let them not say:   we did not see it.
We saw.

Let them not say:   we did not hear it.
We heard.

Let them not say:     they did not taste it.
We ate, we trembled.

Let them not say:   it was not spoken, not written.
We spoke,
we witnessed with voices and hands.

Let them not say:     they did nothing.
We did not-enough.

Let them say, as they must say something: 

A kerosene beauty.
It burned.

Let them say we warmed ourselves by it,
read by its light, praised,
and it burned.

Jane Hirshfield is the author of ten books of poetry, including The Asking: New and Selected Poems (Knopf, 2023).  She's also the author of two now-classic books of essays, Nine Gates (HarperCollins, 1997) and Ten Windows (Knopf, 2015), on the intersecting infrastructure of poetic craft and human lives, and four books presenting and co-translating the work of world poets from the past. Considered one of the foremost spokespersons for issues of the biosphere and interconnection, in 2017 she founded Poets for Science with Kent State's Wick Poetry Center, in conjunction with that year's worldwide March for Science. A former chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations and the NEA, she was elected in 2019 into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. “Let Them Not Say” appears in her latest book: www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/715681/the-asking-by-jane-hirshfield/