The Opposites Game
For Patricia Maisch
This day my students and I play the Opposites Game
with a line from Emily Dickinson. My life had stood
a loaded gun, it goes and I write it on the board,
pausing so they can call out the antonyms –
My Your
Life Death
Had stood ? Will sit
A Many
Loaded Empty
Gun ?
Gun.
For a moment, very much like the one between
lightning and its sound, the children just stare at me,
and then it comes, a flurry, a hail storm of answers –
Flower, says one. No, Book, says another. That's stupid,
cries a third, the opposite of a gun is a pillow. Or maybe
a hug, but not a book, no way is it a book. With this,
the others gather their thoughts
and suddenly it’s a shouting match. No one can agree,
for every student there’s a final answer. It's a song,
a prayer, I mean a promise, like a wedding ring, and
later a baby. Or what’s that person who delivers babies?
A midwife? Yes, a midwife. No, that’s wrong. You're so
wrong you’ll never be right again. It's a whisper, a star,
it's saying I love you into your hand and then touching
someone's ear. Are you crazy? Are you the president
of Stupid-land? You should be, When's the election?
It’s a teddy bear, a sword, a perfect, perfect peach.
Go back to the first one, it's a flower, a white rose.
When the bell rings, I reach for an eraser but a girl
snatches it from my hand. Nothing's decided, she says,
We’re not done here. I leave all the answers
on the board. The next day some of them have
stopped talking to each other, they’ve taken sides.
There's a Flower club. And a Kitten club. And two boys
calling themselves The Snowballs. The rest have stuck
with the original game, which was to try to write
something like poetry.
It's a diamond, it's a dance,
the opposite of a gun is a museum in France.
It's the moon, it's a mirror,
it's the sound of a bell and the hearer.
The arguing starts again, more shouting, and finally
a new club. For the first time I dare to push them.
Maybe all of you are right, I say.
Well, maybe. Maybe it's everything we said. Maybe it’s
everything we didn't say. It's words and the spaces for words.
They're looking at each other now. It's everything in this
room
and outside this room and down the street and in the sky.
It's everyone on campus and at the mall, and all the people
waiting at the hospital. And at the post office. And, yeah,
it's a flower, too. All the flowers. The whole garden.
The opposite of a gun is wherever you point it.
Don’t write that on the board, they say. Just say poem.
Your death will sit through many empty poems.
Hi, my name is Brendan Constantine
and I wrote "The Opposites Game."
Back in 2016,
I was asked to participate
in a rally for an event called,
"Gun Violence Awareness Day."
This particular rally was being held in Tucsan,
and was being coordinated in part by a lady named Patricia Maisch.
And she asked if I would come out
and read poetry as part of the day's event
and she told me that all sorts of folks were going to be there,
including people who opposed the event,
but also in the audience would be friends and family of people who were struck down
during the infamous Tucson shooting of January 2011,
when Representative Gabrielle Giffords was shot.
A number of people were shot that day,
and there were a number of deaths,
and I was told that family members of some of the fallen,
including the mother of Christina Taylor Green, was going to be there.
She was a small child who was killed that day.
And the lady who invited me, Patricia,
is a remarkable woman,
who had helped to disarm the shooter that day.
So I had this strange sort of burden,
I thought, well of course I'm going to go do this,
somebody's asked for a poem,
but at the same time I thought,
"What on earth am I going to say?"
And of course the answer was right in front of me,
because as a school teacher I'd recently had the very experience
that's talked about in the poem,
but I'd never written about it.
And sometimes it just seems to fall in your lap, you know?
You look around and you go,
"Oh my goodness, I'm actually walking around in a poem right now."
So I wrote it in a panic,
and I wrote it in the service of poetry.
Somebody asked for a poem for something,
and I tried to provide it.
I guess the most surprising experience of the poem, and finding out where it landed
was during the March for Our Lives,
the large national demonstration.
Early in the day, people started to send me texts of people carrying banners
with lines from the poem on them.
The line, "The opposite of a gun is wherever you point it,"
started showing up on signs and banners
and even t-shirts...
and all people I didn't know, I mean I didn't know any of these people.
And again, that's sort of odd cause they didn't just read the poem in a magazine
they took a line out of it and carried that line around with them.
I mean that's, that's amazing,
and at that point you just go,
"Well this isn't your poem anymore,
this is their poem now.
This is Patricia's poem.
This poem belongs to everybody that remembers it."
So that was hugely surprising.
I think everybody should read Brigit Pegeen Kelly's poem, "Song."
It's not an easy poem,
it is a breathtaking, heartrending poem,
it's a poem about childhood,
it's a poem about magic,
it's a poem about grief,
and it is a poem about sweetness,
the sweetness in everything,
especially the sweetness in heartbreak.
I saw her read it, and when she finished,
I was a different writer.