JANE HIRSHFIELD
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“And if you like numbers, I will tell you that
here on earth—”
Etel Adnan
I wake thinking about
a woman with whom I once shared a mountain.
If you, as she did, like numbers,
I can tell you that here on earth, this day,
it is 55 degrees—
a June 9th uncommonly cold.
I can tell you that for company,
now, this day, you have roughly eight billion living kin.
I can tell you that since sapiens sapiens’ beginning,
one hundred and seventeen billion
have breathed in, out, and in again then, at least once.
That worldwide, this day, one person in seven is hungry.
That thirty-two countries are listed as “zones in conflict.”
That Beirut, where the woman was born, is called “past the brink.”
If you like numbers, I can tell you
a single great blue heron flew earlier by a ten-windowed alcove,
that in Canada, 10.6 million acres
burn today still unchecked,
though this morning, the smoke has moved elsewhere,
its parts-per-millions returning their color to two big wings folded up
in a tree.
I can tell you: conceived yesterday, something like 385,000 babies.
And that tomorrow, 158,000 – all ages – will probably die.
There is also this to consider about numbers:
the way that the more a life’s counted, the less that life seems to count.
I can tell you that one person born in Beirut, dead in Paris,
for a time shared with me a mountain in California she never forgot.
I can tell you its colors inside her paintings still astonish.
Mountain, mountain, mountain, kept saying her brush.
Originally published in ORION. Used with the poet's permission.
Award-winning poet, essayist, and translator Jane Hirshfield is the author of ten collections of poetry, including The Asking: New and Selected Poems (2023); Ledger (2020); The Beauty (2015), longlisted for the National Book Award; Come, Thief (2011), a finalist for the PEN USA Poetry Award; and Given Sugar, Given Salt (2001), a finalist for the National Book Critics Award. Hirshfield is also the author of two collections of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry (1997) and Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World (2015), and has edited and co-translated four books collecting the work of world poets from the past: The Ink Dark Moon: Poems by Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Court of Japan (1990); Women in Praise of the Sacred: Forty-Three Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women (1994); Mirabai: Ecstatic Poems (2004); and The Heart of Haiku (2011).