A History Without Suffering

In this poem there is no suffering. It spans hundreds of years and records no deaths, connecting when it can, those moments where people are healthy and happy, content to be alive. A Chapter, maybe a Volume, shorn of violence consists of an adult reading aimlessly. This line is the length of a full life smuggled in while no one was plotting against a neighbour, except in jest. Then, after a gap, comes Nellie. She is in a drought-fisted field with a hoe. This is her twelfth year on the land, and today her back doesn’t hurt. Catechisms of self-pity and of murder have declared a day’s truce in the Civil War within her. So today, we can bring Nellie, content with herself, with the world, into our History. For a day. In the next generation we find a suitable subject camping near the border of a divided country: for a while no one knows how near. For these few lines she is ours. But how about the lovers? you ask, the freshly-washed body close to yours; sounds, smells, tastes; anticipation of the young, the edited memory of the rest of us? How about thoughts higher than their thinkers?...Yes, yes. Give them half a line and a mass of footnotes: they have their own privileged history, like inherited income beside our husbandry. We bring our History up to date in a city like London: someone’s just paid the mortgage, is free of guilt and not dying of cancer; and going past the news-stand, doesn’t see a headline advertising torture. This is all recommended reading, but in small doses. It shows you can avoid suffering, if you try.