Soulwork
One’s is to feed. One’s is to cleave.
One’s to be doubled over under greed.
One’s is strife. One’s to be strangled by life.
One’s to be called and to rise.
One’s to stare fire in the eye.
One’s is bondage to pleasure.
One’s to be held captive by power.
One’s to drive a nation to its naked knees
in war. One’s is the rapture of stolen hours.
One’s to be called yet cower.
One’s is to defend the dead.
One’s to suffer until ego is shed.
One’s is to dribble the nectar of evil.
One’s but to roll a stone up a hill.
One’s to crouch low
over damp kindling in deep snow
coaxing the thin plume
of cautious smoke.
One’s is only to shiver.
One’s is only to blow.
Copyright © 2021 by Tracy K. Smith. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on March 8, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.
“This poem gave me a way to contemplate the possibility that each of us is here on earth to do a different kind of work for the benefit of the individual soul. I find it consoling to imagine that we are here to learn to love, to serve a large good like justice. But what if it is equally necessary to learn suffering, or guilt, or futility? What if there are whole lifetimes we must move through with these as our lessons?”
—Tracy K. Smith
Tracy K. Smith
Tracy K. Smith is the author of Such Color: New and Selected Poems (Graywolf Press, 2021), Wade in the Water (Graywolf Press, 2018), winner of the 2019 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Poetry, Life on Mars (Graywolf Press, 2011), winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and Duende (Graywolf Press, 2007), which received the 2006 James Laughlin Award. Smith served as the poet laureate of the United States from 2017 to 2019.