I had no dictionary sense of what the words actually meant. Arabic was a private tongue reserved for God, God’s own tongue, and I understood that if I spoke it to God earnestly, mellifluously, it would thin the membrane between us.

Poets have invested themselves in this promise for millennia. The idea that mellifluous, earnest language might thin the partition between our world and the next, between our world and the divine. That there might in our breath exist a bit of spirit that could be harnessed, bridled. It’s an idea as old as language, as old as incantation.

The earliest attributable author in all of human literature is an ancient Sumerian priestess named Enheduanna. The daughter of King Sargon, Enheduanna wrote sensual, desperate hymns to the goddess Inanna. Written around 2300 bce, Enheduanna’s poems were the bedrock upon which much of ancient poetics was built. And her obsession? The precipitating subject of all our species’ written word? Inanna, an ecstatic and often desperate awe at the divine.

Here’s an excerpt from her Hymn to Inanna, translated by Jane Hirshfield:¹

Lady of all powers,
In whom light appears,
Radiant one
Beloved of Heaven and Earth,
Tiara-crowned Lady of all powers,
In whom light appears,
Radiant one
Beloved of Heaven and Earth,
Tiara-crowned
Priestess of the Highest God,
My Lady, you are the guardian
Of all greatness.

Priestess of the Highest God,
My Lady, you are the guardian
Of all greatness.
Your hand holds the seven powers:
You lift the powers of being,
You have hung them over your fingers,
You have gathered the many powers,
You have clasped them now
Like necklaces onto your breast.

Like a dragon,
You poisoned the land—
When you roared at the earth
In your thunder,
Nothing green could live.
A flood fell from the mountain:
You, Inanna,
Foremost in Heaven and Earth.
Lady riding a beast,
You rained fire on the heads of men.
Taking your power from the Highest,
Following the commands of the Highest,
Lady of all the great rites,
Who can understand all that is yours?

In the forefront
Of the battle,
All is struck down by you—
O winged Lady,
Like a bird
You scavenge the land.
Like a charging storm
You charge,
Like a roaring storm
You roar,
You thunder in thunder,
Snort in rampaging winds.
Your feet are continually restless.
Carrying your harp of sighs,
You breathe out the music of mourning.

It was in your service
That I first entered
The holy temple,
I, Enheduanna,
The highest priestess.
I carried the ritual basket,
I chanted your praise.
Now I have been cast out
To the place of lepers.
Day comes,
And the brightness
Is hidden around me.
Shadows cover the light,
Drape it in sandstorms.
My beautiful mouth knows only confusion.
Even my sex is dust.

I could spend a long time just marveling at this artifact. Enheduanna was one of my most treasured companions through the COVID quarantine—a woman who lived roughly 43 centuries ago, writing about the same things I’ve spent my life wondering about, wandering toward: What language can and cannot do. Doubt, exile, bewilderment.

There is, in the vast shadow of a pandemic, of a fascistic regime, of total irreversible ecological collapse, a sense of the utter unprecedentedness of our moment. It’s easy to feel rudderless, like there is no path forward that includes the survival of our humanity.

But then, reading a poet like Enheduanna, I feel, more than anything else, utterly precedented. She was writing to Inanna, the ancient Sumerian goddess of love and fertility and war. But, in stanza three, she may as well have been writing to the American god too, the money god, whose reign of destruction has also “poisoned the land” and ensured “nothing green could live.” Fracking and Monsanto and microbeads are all twenty-first- century faces on a species-old problem—mankind’s corrosive impact on the earth.

She writes in the poem of exile, saying: “I carried the ritual basket, / I chanted your praise. / Now I have been cast out / To the place of lepers. / Day comes, / And the brightness / Is hidden around me.”

It is unclear when or why Enheduanna was exiled, only that after her father’s death, her brother took over the kingdom of Ur, and she was, for a time, banished. The great moral tests of the twenty-first century will be refugee crises, which will only grow more dire over time, as the effects of climate change continue to displace populations. Thus far, we as a species have failed these tests miserably. What can an ancient Sumerian poet teach us about immigration reform?

Track the rage in the excerpt’s final moments: “And the brightness / Is hidden around me. / Shadows cover the light, / Drape it in sandstorms. / My beautiful mouth knows only confusion. / Even my sex is dust.”

I find myself unaccountably moved by this language. For one, it is clearly the language of a poet throwing her hands up, saying “I don’t know what language can or can’t do, but I am desperate, and I need someone to hear this.” It’s the promise I found inside language as a boy, praying with my family in Arabic—here I am, speaking earnestly, mellifluously, believing such speech can be an end in itself.

But I am also drawn to Enheduanna’s rage. Today, more than anything else, it’s rage that seems to govern me. I am an Iranian mostly raised in America, caught between two national regimes actively toxic to hope. To quote Audre Lorde: “It is not my anger that launches rockets, spends over sixty thousand dollars a second on missiles and other agents of war and death, slaughters children in cities, stockpiles nerve gas and chemical bombs.”² Hope comes and goes in a world that actively conspires against it. But occasions for anger bloom daily in both of my nations—state murder of civilians, voter suppression, murderous foreign policies. In such a world, an engine that runs on rage will never sputter. And ultimately, I do think rage is a measure of tenderness. Rage is our ability to imagine wholly the humanity of the harmed. Enheduanna trains us in that imagining.

That I’m in recovery is no secret; my whole first book largely orbits my getting clean. A year after I got sober, I learned from a routine physical that my liver was behaving abnormally, teetering on the precipice of pre-cirrhosis. This was after a year of excruciating recovery, a year in which nothing harder than Ibuprofen passed through my body. If it’s this bad after a year of healing, a nurse told me, imagine how bad it must have been a year ago when you quit. The Greek poet Sappho, born roughly 630 BCE, was by all accounts one of history’s greatest poets, but the entire corpus of her work burned with the great library of Alexandria, so today we only know her through the bits other writers quoted. She wrote, “Because I prayed / this word: / I want,”³ but we don’t have the entirety of the poem preceding it, her “because” hanging there to explain some now unimaginable consequence of desire.

I am, understandably I think, obsessed with desire and its consequences. If my liver function was still so erratic after a year of healing, then at the end of my active addiction I must have been near some sort of Rubicon from which there could be no return. Some awareness permeated my dense fog of destruction. That awareness might have been bodily, the way an iron deficiency sometimes provokes in a person an unconscious desire to eat dirt. It might have been fatigue, a cumulative sense that the corrosive manner of my living had become untenable. Or, it might have been something else. I’ll never know, which I think is the point.

A common formulation states that prayer is a way of speaking to the divine and meditation is a way of listening for it. Poetry synthesizes these, the silence of active composition being a time even the most skeptical writers use the language of the metaphysical, saying “such-and-such a phrase just came to me,” or “those hours just flew by.” And reading is a process through which dark runes on a page or strange vocalizations in the air can provoke us to laugh, to weep, to call our mothers or donate to Greenpeace or shiver with awe.

It is wrong to think of God as a debt to luck. But I could have died, and then I didn’t. I haven’t. When so many around me, like me, did and have. The grief of survivor’s guilt is real. The omnipresent grief of still being here and not knowing what to make of it.

Most of us are familiar with the Kübler-Ross model of grief, named for Swiss psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross who wrote about grief, based on her work with terminally ill patients.⁴ The model states that dying people, or those who love dying people, will often pass through five main terminals of grief: denial, anger, depression, bargaining, and acceptance.

David Kessler, a psychiatrist who co-authored a book with Kübler-Ross while she was alive, in which they expanded the model to apply to major traumatic life events such as divorce or incarceration, recently wrote that the model could be applied to the COVID-19 crisis as well.⁵

Again, I found a model in ancient poetry that already understood these stages of grief. Here is a poem from the Indigenous Mesoamerican Nahuatl people orbiting a mother’s death in childbirth, first recorded in the sixteenth century but likely quite a bit older, “The Midwife Addresses the Woman Who Has Died in Childbirth,” translated by John Bierhorst:⁶

Precious feather, child,
Eagle woman, dear one,
Dove, daring daughter,
You have labored, you have toiled,
Your task is finished.
You came to the aid of your Mother, the noble lady, Cihuacoatl Quilaztli.
You received, raised up, and held the shield, the little buckler that she laid in your hands: she your Mother, the noble lady, Cihuacoatl Quilaztli.
Now wake! Rise! Stand up!
Comes the daylight, the daybreak:
Dawn’s house has risen crimson, it comes up standing.
The crimson swifts, the crimson swallows, sing,
And all the crimson swans are calling.
Get up, stand up! Dress yourself!
Go! Go seek the good place, the perfect place, the home of your Mother,
your Father, the Sun,
The place of happiness, joy,
Delight, rejoicing.
Go! Go follow your Mother, your Father, the Sun.
May his elder sisters bring you to him: they the exalted, the celestial women,
who always and forever know happiness, joy, delight, and rejoicing, in the company and in the presence of our Mother, our Father, the Sun; who make him happy with their shouting.
My child, darling daughter, lady,
You spent yourself, you labored manfully:
You made yourself a victor, a warrior for Our Lord, though not without consuming all your strength; you sacrificed yourself.
Yet you earned a compensation, a reward: a good, perfect, precious death.
By no means did you die in vain.
And are you truly dead? You have made a sacrifice. Yet how else could you have become worthy of what you now deserve?
You will live forever, you will be happy, you will rejoice in the company and in the presence of our holy ones, the exalted women. Farewell, my daughter, my child. Go be with them, join them. Let them hold you and take you in.
May you join them as they cheer him and shout to him: our Mother, our Father, the Sun;
And may you be with them always, whenever they go in their rejoicing.

But my little child, my daughter, my lady,
You went away and left us, you deserted us, and we are but old men and old women.
You have cast aside your mother and your father.
Was this your wish? No, you were summoned, you were called.
Yet without you, how can we survive?
How painful will it be, this hard old age?
Down what alleys or in what doorways will we perish?
Dear lady, do not forget us! Remember the hardships that we see, that we suffer, here on earth:
The heat of the sun presses against us; also the wind, icy and cold:
This flesh, this clay of ours, is starved and trembling. And we, poor prisoners of our stomachs! There is nothing we can do.
Remember us, my precious daughter, O eagle woman, O lady!
You lie beyond in happiness. In the good place, the perfect place,
You live.
In the company and in the presence of our lord,
You live.
You as living flesh can see him, you as living flesh can call to him.
Pray to him for us!
Call to him for us!
This is the end,
We leave the rest to you.

This ancient poem of Indigneous Mesoamerica preceded the Kübler-Ross model by at least 500 years, but you can map the five stages of grief almost directly onto the poem:

Denial: “Wake! Rise! Stand up!” Anger: “You went away and left us, you deserted us, and we are but old men / and old women. / You have cast aside your mother and your father.” Depression: “Yet without you, how can we survive? / How painful will it be, this hard old age? / Down what alleys or in what doorways will we perish?” Bargaining: “You as living flesh can see him, you as living flesh can call to him. / Pray to him for us! / Call to him for us!” Acceptance: “This is the end, / We leave the rest to you.”

What can ancient spiritual poetry teach us about our living? A living that so often feels governed by grief? Half a millenium before Kübler-Ross studied this phenomenon clinically, the Nahuatl people were already teaching it.

It’s important to note here that “American spiritual poetry” didn’t begin with Dickinson or Whitman or anyone else writing in English, but with the Mesoamerican and Native American people who inhabited the land that would later be called “America,” passing their sacred texts along for centuries. Relative to how long those texts were a part of the earth’s spiritual history, Anglo-American writers like Dickinson (who I love!) and Whitman (who has his uses) are relatively brand new.

To flatten the project of “spiritual poetry” to a bunch of white Romantic and Metaphysical poets is to erase the Ethiopian epic Kebra Negast, to wash away Li Po and Rabi’a and Mahadeviyakka and Teresa of Avila and Bashō and Gilgamesh. It’s a colonization, one that erases not only bodies and lands, but actual spirits.

One of the questions you can ask a poem: to what do I owe my being here? Li Po says: “I sing, and moon rocks back and forth; / I dance, and shadow tumbles into pieces.”⁷ Anna Akhmatova: “The word dropped like a stone / on my still living breast.”⁸

My working definition of sacred poetry rises directly out of my experience as a child praying in Arabic: earnest, musical language meant to thin the partition between a person and a divine, whether that divine is God or the universe or desire or land or family or justice or community or love or . . . or . . . or. As with my early prayers in Arabic, a one-to-one denotative understanding of the language isn’t important. What matters is the making of music and the sincerity of the making.

When I was getting sober, I found no easy prayers, no poems to sing me well. What I did find was that, during the early days of my recovery, when sobriety was minute-to-minute—white knuckles and endless pacing and cheap coffee by the pot—poetry was a place I could put myself. I could read a book of poems and for an hour, two hours, I didn’t have to worry about accidentally killing myself. I could write a poem and the language for what was happening would just come to me. Hours would just fly by.

Rabi’a al-Basri, writing in 717 ce: “Kings have locked their doors / and each lover is alone with his love. / Here, I am alone with You.”⁹

My active addiction was a time of absolute certainty—certainty of my own victimhood, of my convictions, of what I was owed by a universe that had split me from the land of my birth and dropped me into an America that was actively hostile to my presence. That certainty destroyed whatever it touched, corroding my own life and the lives of people who loved me. In recovery when I threw myself into poetry, I was drawn to poems that were certain of nothing, poems that embraced mystery instead of trying to resolve it.

It’s not just writers from antiquity who take up the challenge of unknowing. Even today, when irony remains the default posture of the public intellectual, poets remain relentlessly sincere in their explorations of the spirit and faith, of the mysteries that make and shape us. Here’s Lucille Clifton’s “my dream about the second coming”:

mary is an old woman without shoes.
she doesn’t believe it.
not when her belly starts to bubble
and leave the print of a finger where
no man touches.
not when the snow in her hair melts away.
not when the stranger she used to wait for
appears dressed in lights at her
kitchen table.
she is an old woman and
doesn’t believe it.

when Something drops onto her toes one night
she calls it a fox
but she feeds it.¹⁰

The capitalization in the third to last line is Clifton’s, it’s Clifton’s poem within the poem. SOMETHING. A proper noun, despite its own mystery. When I talk about engagement with spiritual poetics being an exercise in sitting in mystery without trying to resolve it, this is what I mean. A capital S Something drops onto your toes one night and you don’t know how or why, but you feed it. Clifton has an entire suite of “fox” poems orbiting this mysterious Something fox, delving into its mystery without ever really diminishing it. Clifton teaches me to wander into mystery without galloping toward some hasty and inorganic conclusion. Which in turn informs my living.

I am trying to persuade you of the contemporary utility of writing that orbits what G. K. Chesterton called a “vertigo of the infinite,”¹¹ what Clifton called “the lip of our understanding.”¹² Inquiries into the divine still connect contemporary poets to their ancestors. In one poem, the twelfth-century Kannada poet-saint Mahadeviyakka writes:

When the body becomes Your mirror,
how can it serve?

When the mind becomes your mind,
what is left to remember?¹³

In her “Astonishment,” written over 800 years later, twentieth-century Polish Nobel laureate Wisława Szymborska seems almost to pick up where the ancient Kannada poet left off, wrapping question after question around the immobilizing strangeness of being anything:

Why after all this one and not the rest?
Why this specific self, not in a nest,
but a house? Sewn up not in scales, but skin?
Not topped off by a leaf, but by a face?¹⁴

The great Persian poet Hafez wrote, “Start seeing everything as God, but keep it a secret.”¹⁵ I still have no idea what I mean when I say God, but I see it everywhere. I mean it intensely. I write poems and, yes, books about it. I read about it constantly, which seems, counterintuitively, to only deepen its secret. Close your eyes. Imagine in your head a bladeless knife with no handle. Do you see how the image recedes from view the more language I add to it? A bladeless knife. With no handle.

Today the great weapon used to stifle critical thinking is a raw overwhelm of meaningless language at every turn—on our phones, on our TVs, in our periphery on billboards and subways. So often the language is passionately absolute: immigrants are evil, climate change is a hoax, and this new Rolex will make you sexually irresistible. Poetry opposes these things, asks us to slow down our metabolization of language, to become aware of it entering us. Sacred poetry teaches us to be comfortable with complexity, to be skeptical of unqualified certitude. In reminding us that language has history, density, integrity, such poetry is a potent antidote against a late-capitalist empire that would use empty, vapid language to cudgel us into inaction.

The bladeless knife. With no handle. I can’t think of a more useful skill to arm yourself with right now than the ability to sit in mystery without trying to resolve it. Carolyn Forché writes about poets who “don’t easily extricate morality, ethics, the sacred, and the political. For them, it’s not possible to think of these as isolated categories, but rather as modes of human contemplation and action which are inextricably bound to one another.”¹⁶ An attuned permeability to wonder compels the curious poet to rigorously examine their stations, both cosmic and civic.

So many of my students, my friends, have articulated some version of one particular anxiety to me since the pandemic began. Perhaps you have experienced it too. The anxiety is: How can my writing matter right now? How can anything I have to say be timely or worthwhile?

To them I continually point toward Enheduanna, whose four-millennia-old poetry feels utterly, miraculously prescient to me in my living today. I point to the Mesoamericans who taught us how to move through grief centuries before psychiatry and psychotherapy became serious medical disciplines. I point to Clifton, to Szymborska, to Rabi’a and Mahadeviyakka and all the other poets discussed here. Writing Snapchat or Miley Cyrus into a poem doesn’t make it timely. Writing in humanity, in its endless mysterious baffle, does.

I want to end with a poem by the eighteenth-century Japanese poet Kobayashi Issa translated by Robert Haas, which, in its entirety, reads:

             The man pulling radishes
pointed my way
             with a radish.¹⁷

The first time I read this poem, it felt like a trick, like a silly one-off (the great masters wrote those, too). Something about it stuck with me, though. Something about its repetition. Heidegger wrote:

Language itself is—language and nothing else besides. Language itself is language. The understanding that is schooled in logic . . . calls this proposition an empty tautology. Merely to say the identical thing twice—language is language—how is that supposed to get us anywhere? But we do not want to get anywhere. We would like only, for once, to get to just where we are already.¹⁸

To get to just where we already are. The man pulling radishes is strapped to his living like anyone else. What does a man pulling radishes have to point the way? Well, a radish of course.

We are inheritors of a murderous age. As writers, we’ve deputized ourselves wardens of our most dangerous technology: the English language. A language invented by men. A language deployed throughout history in service of colonization, genocide, ecological decimation, chattel slavery, the building and deployment of nuclear weapons, drone warfare, and more. That’s our paint. That’s our radish.

What are we to do, then? We who are tethered to language like a plant to the soil. We who write into a country run by religious zealots to their one true God, the late capitalist Money God, to whom they would sacrifice our lives, the lives of the people we love and people who love the way we love. What are we to do, amidst such zealotry?

Our ancestors have given us models. Reject certainty, which exists only in the rhetoric of zealots and tyrants. Reject false equivalencies, the vapid argle-bargle of empire. Adjust our metabolization of language to remind us of its materiality, its power. Our task as wardens of our species’ most dangerous technology? To treat our materials seriously. Embrace the mystery of earnest, mellifluous language. Embrace its infinite potential to thin the partition between us and the world we seek.

Kaveh Akbar is the author of Pilgrim Bell (Graywolf Press, 2021) and Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Alice James Books, 2017; Penguin UK, 2018). He is also the author of a chapbook, Portrait of the Alcoholic (Sibling Rivalry, 2017), and editor of The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 110 Poets on the Divine. Born in Tehran, Iran, he now teaches at the University of Iowa. Since 2020, Kaveh has served as poetry editor for The Nation.