The worst thing we ever did
was take the dance and the song
out of prayer
made it sit up straight
and cross its legs
removed it of rejoicing
wiped clean its hip sway,
its questions,
its ecstatic yowl,
its tears.
I don’t recall the first time someone emailed me and said, “You need to read Chelan Harkin.” Admittedly, I get emails like this all the time, and while I appreciate how friends, family members and readers like to share their latest literary finds with me, the constraints of my own schedule mean I’m often simply too busy to follow every poetic rabbit trail.
But those emails keep coming. And then, my wife discovered Chelan Harkin. And suddenly, I was hearing her poetry all the time, because Fran just kept reading it to me.
And pretty soon, I was hooked. Here was a gifted young poet who combined the accessibility of Mary Oliver with the mystical wisdom of Rumi. And that’s an intoxicating combination indeed.
A true poet of our time, Chelan Harkin got her start simply by sharing her verse on social media. Like most bloggers and online writers, she developed a loyal but small following. And then one day she posted “The Worst Thing We Ever Did,” and immediately found it getting shared (and “liked”) tens of thousands of times.
Despite the negative sound of the title, it’s a poem about finding liberation in undoing some of the spiritual mistakes we (collectively) have made in the past. “The worst thing we ever did was put God in the sky out of reach,” she wrote, “pulling the divinity from the leaf, sifting out the holy from our bones, insisting God isn’t bursting dazzlement through everything…”
As my wife would almost invariably say like an antiphon after every time she’s read a Chelan poem to me, “Isn’t that lovely?”
Yes, it’s lovely to be reminded that God isn’t far away, that prayer and dancing go hand in hand, that leaves and hips and questions and yowls are holy. The theologian Johann Baptist Metz once said that the shortest definition of religion is interruption. Likewise, the shortest definition of mysticism is reminding. God bless the Chelan Harkins of the world, who remind us who we are in such eloquent and beautiful ways.
Quotation source: “The Worst Thing” by Chelan Harkin, which can be accessed here: www.chelanharkinpoetry.com/selected-poems/
It’s also found in her first book of poetry, Susceptible to Light.