No one wants a gathering of aunts. They will sit in a semi-circle, with me before them: head low and my shame a halo above my head. They will pass my poem from one bewildered hand to another. It will be a love poem. They will shake their heads; make a valley out of their mouths, clap their hands, and let out both audible and inaudible sighs. They will look at me with eyes carrying both disappointment and wonder. They will wonder how I am able to write all these things. Wonder how I even know these things exist, the child that I am. They will try to reconcile their sweet daughter with the stranger on the page. Then they will ask for the identity of the one who has taken my heart..
Perhaps, given the new shame in so many places around the world, it is especially urgent for humanity not only to read “Es werde liecht” (Let there be light) but also to live it.
Both parents attended their son’s performance at Solothurner Literaturtage (Literature Festival 15-17 Mai 2025) and his father said proudly: “We have created him”. Jonathan grew up in Switzerland. He mentions that it is a place that allows him to face the past, not as a burden, but as chance, that allows him to use words (prose, poems, spoken word and Rap) to resist, to forget and to nourish hope.
It isn’t that I have never written a poem in the absence of melancholy. I have. But there is a way melancholy pokes into your soul; it makes you feel things; it lifts the curtain over your eyes and makes you see the world with vivid alacrity. There is a way it sequestrates the feelings out of you and turns them into words. There is a way melancholy does these that joy simply doesn’t know how to. Melancholy is poetry’s favorite child.
