For What Binds Us

There are names for what binds us:

strong forces, weak forces.

Look around, you can see them:

the skin that forms in a half-empty cup,

nails rusting into the places they join,

joints dovetailed on their own weight.

The way things stay so solidly

wherever they've been set down—

and gravity, scientists say, is weak.

And see how the flesh grows back

across a wound, with a great vehemence,

more strong

than the simple, untested surface before.

There's a name for it on horses,

when it comes back darker and raised: proud flesh,

as all flesh,

is proud of its wounds, wears them

as honors given out after battle,

small triumphs pinned to the chest—

And when two people have loved each other

see how it is like a

scar between their bodies,

stronger, darker, and proud;

how the black cord makes of them a single fabric

that nothing can tear or mend.

Jane Hirshfield

Jane Hirshfield is an award-winning poet, essayist, and translator whose work explores consciousness, impermanence, suffering, wonder, and the intricate relationships between the human and natural worlds. She is the author of ten collections of poetry, including The Asking: New and Selected Poems (2023), Ledger (2020), The Beauty (2015), and Come, Thief (2011), as well as two collections of essays on poetry, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry and Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World. She has also translated and edited poetry from several literary and spiritual traditions.

Her honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Rockefeller Foundation; the Poetry Center Book Award and California Book Award; and the Academy Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets. She was elected a Chancellor of the Academy in 2012 and inducted into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2019. In 2017, she founded Poets for Science, connecting poetry and scientific inquiry in response to the growing crisis of the biosphere.