Gwendolyn Brooks / Ross Gay

By: 
Victoria O’Brien
Desert Island Dispatches

National Poetry Month continues, so this week I returned to my pile of saved poems and decided to write about not one, but two: Gwendolyn Brook’s “To the Young Who Want to Die” and Ross Gay’s “Sorrow Is Not My Name.” Ordinarily, I wouldn’t choose to write about two different poems from two different writers at the same time, but the fact is that one would not exist without the other: they are in dialogue with each other. And anyway, they’re both wonderful and very dear to me.
Brooks’s poem came in a collection first published in 1987 and serves as a litany against giving into suicidal ideations, ending with the simple couplet: “Graves grow no green that you can use. / Remember, green’s your color. You are Spring.” Over 20 years later, Gay penned his poem as a response, crafting a list of innocuous, every day things that give his life meaning and push him to carry on in spite of the black dog of depression, and he ends it thusly: “I remember. My color’s green. I’m spring.”
The poems were first introduced to me by a friend who has depression, which I have also struggled with over the years. It was those final lines and their symbolism and power that I kept coming back to, again and again, in the years that followed, as I recovered and my friend did, too. In traditional literary analysis, green symbolizes newness as does Spring when taken as a metaphor for the phases of life.
At 28 or 29, I began developing a kind of gnawing dread about turning 30. I felt anxious and behind, and somehow, despite everything I had accomplished, like I’d done nothing at all in my life that was worth celebrating. In reality, it was an existential crisis and I was having my own private meltdown because I would finally be a real adult. Until that point, for most of my adult life, I’d heard about how I had so much time to accomplish all of my dreams and goals — after 30? Nope. A friend was kind enough to warn me that no one says that once you hit 30. Similarly, any mistakes I made would be treated more harshly than if I were still 23 and ‘figuring it out,’ which I find a bit ironic because from what I hear, nobody has it figured out, not even the nonagenarians.
And, of course, there were the things I’d internalized as a child, outdated benchmarks to success that I felt I was supposed to have hit: a college degree (dropped out to make art for a living, oops), marriage (it was never the right person at the right time, but the wrong person at the wrong time or, worse still, the right person at the wrong time), home ownership (have you looked on Zillow lately?) and so on. Professionally, I was successful. Personally, I was happy. But none of it felt quite enough and none of it stopped the slow-creeping dread.
A different friend, in a conversation one night, mentioned that she never expected to make it past 25, which jolted me. I don’t think I’d ever heard it said so plainly and I don’t think it was until then that I realized I hadn’t planned to be this old. It wasn’t like I’d been planning actively an exit, it was just that I’d been young and living in the moment, day-by-day, for whatever thrill had come along.
I think we die hundreds of little deaths over the course of our lives. One of my favorite things about people is our capacity for change, despite it being very scary for us to do. And so, more recently, I’ve been interested in the idea of reinvention, in how many lives can be lived in one lifetime.
I am no longer in the Spring of my life, but the Summer, but I do still go back to these poems often enough because they’ve changed, too. They remind me of the promise that comes with the courage to change: renewal, new ventures, new opportunities, and yes, more life.

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