re: eve ewing’s “testify”
The first time I read this poem by Eve Ewing, I want to say that it came in an email, that I was checking my email compulsively, like I tend to do for some reason, as if I’m continually waiting for some news, any news, to disrupt my day-to-day. Something I can drop everything else for and say, Wait, I got the news! I feel like it’s probably good news I’m looking for, but what exactly, I’m never sure, and when I do get good news in my inbox, I end up just wanting more good news. Sometimes immediately after, I am waiting for that other even more elusive email.
Anyway, I think this poem came in an email, and I remember being intrigued because it was called “testify.” I used to be all about testifying because I was super Christian at one point, and so I wanted to read this poem, and be like, “Christians, huh?” and then go on waiting mysteriously for my good news email, whatever that may be.
But what I loved about this poem—which made me cry the first time I read it and makes me cry sometimes still—is that it gives homage to that one way of testifying via gratitude, thanking god for the good things, but it’s also so open in the sense that “god” is in lowercase, which makes me feel like god could be anything, could be Good Organized Direction, as Beth Pickens thinks of it, which is the way I tend to think of it now too. God is up to you, and this poem’s gratitude for a life that we are still living with its good and bad parts feels at once so specific and relevant to everyone.
Ewing writes, “I stand before you to say / that today i walked home / & caught the light through / the fence & it was so golden / i wanted to cry.” There’s something so tender about this and so true—this sense of just, for a moment, even with all of the hubbub and busyness and tech encroaching more and more into our day- to-day life, this sense of remembering that you’re here and that there is a sun that can look especially golden some days. The reality of that, the tangibility of it, maybe, can wake your body up, make you remember.
The other week, I rode my bike to this park near my house because I heard it’s good to take your shoes off and let your feet touch the grass sometimes? (Has anyone else heard this?) And everybody was out and about, even though it’s getting darker and colder outside: this guy was playing with his toddler daughter in the grass, and some people were throwing a Frisbee around—the sun was setting. The world felt tangible in that moment and right in front of me. I understood Ewing’s urge to respond to the presence around you with your own.
She goes on to write, “& a man who wore the walk of hard grounds & lost days / came toward me in the street / & said ‘girl what a beautiful day’ & I said yes, testify.” There’s something here too, the experience of not just feeling like the world is tangible, present, in front of you, but that other people are here with you—that you can make eye contact with a stranger who feels familiar in the sense that looking at them you feel like you know what they’ve gone through, things you’ve gone through too, in your own way, and still the day can be beautiful, and you can testify about that, and sure it can be like a Baptist church testimony, or it can be “testify “ as it’s defined in Oxford Languages: to “serve as evidence or proof of something’s existing or being the case.” You can say to someone else that this is proof we are here. Let’s acknowledge that we are here, and even as we’ve walked “hard grounds & lost days” we are still here, and the day can be golden.
Ewing’s speaker walks on, says “from some place a horn rose, an organ, / a voice, a chorus, here to tell / you that we are not dead / we are not dead / we are not / dead,” and it goes on, a repetition that feels even more powerful as it grows, ends in “we are not / dead / yet,” and reader, you are alive, somehow, and it’s almost my birthday (!). I’ve been here for 30 years, going on 31, and some of them have been “hard grounds” and some of them have been “lost days,” but sometimes the sun is golden, and I want to show the proof however I can. Anyway, all of this to say that this was my good news email, after all, discovering this poem, and maybe, in my checking since then, I’m just looking for more reminders like this one to hold onto what I can.
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You can check out Eve Ewing’s “testify” here: https://poets.org/poem/testify
