Some thoughts on the poems ‘Tenderness’ and ‘The Walls of the Heart Show Graffiti’, published in Issue Fourteen.

‘Tenderness is the most modest form of love. It is the kind of love that does not appear in the scriptures or the gospels, no one swears by it, no one cites it. It has no special emblems or symbols, nor does it lead to crime, or prompt envy.

Tenderness is spontaneous and disinterested; it goes far beyond empathetic fellow feeling. Instead it is the conscious, though perhaps slightly melancholy, common sharing of fate. Tenderness is deep emotional concern about another being, its fragility, its unique nature, and its lack of immunity to suffering and the effects of time. Tenderness perceives the bonds that connect us, the similarities and sameness between us. It is a way of looking that shows the world as being alive, living, interconnected, cooperating with, and codependent on itself.

Literature is built on tenderness toward any being other than ourselves.’

These are the words of the Polish Nobel Literature Laureate Olga Tokarczuk, and come from her acceptance speech in 2019. From the moment I read them I was blown away. Here was someone speaking in the least bombastic of ways about possibility, about love, about how no matter what else happens in our lives, we have this amazing possibility that may be captured by the idea of ‘tenderness’.

I knew immediately that I wanted to write about tenderness: what it was for me, how it has affected my life, and how I might inhabit it as best I can for the remainder of my life. There is less life to be lived now than before, so tenderness was a term that enabled me to look back as if telescopically and isolate certain moments I now see might be called moments of ‘tenderness’. Suddenly I was seeing tenderness everywhere. It deferred a new authority on my inner life. All the things I had thought about, reflected on, through moments of happiness and moments of disaster, could be pulled out of their tight casement and seen for what they were: the simplest moments of tenderness.

And so in this poem my view of the body as a micro galaxy finds space, the beautiful ‘soft-washing’ of heart and lungs, valves and bronchi with blood and oxygen. The reference to this came from my observing on the old laptop the different slivers of my own body from throat to abdomen after I had a CAT scan. How beautiful this space is in each of us! What an interiority we carry around with us while the world plays out its dramas. But the tenderness I refer to in this poem is also to be found where fault lines appear, when things go wrong. Therefore broken posts and falling twists of wisteria after rain and storm and damp. How we feel the weight of things dying, but on the other hand our bodies prevail: sometimes, we have earth beneath our fingernails, cuts to our skin, sometimes tables go uncleaned, and for women sometimes pelvic floors collapse never to rise again. While that happens, there’s always the threat of an off-course asteroid according to CNN or wherever you find your news. Either way, whether it’s an asteroid, a pelvic floor, drooping breasts, or the gravity of age itself, there may be tenderness. Why? Because all these things are presences and we have the option of accepting that which we can do little about. We are not here to brashly triumph over adversity, but to do so quietly, to tread lightly.

In treading lightly, how often do we have to hold our tongues, bite back the sharp response, stop even for five minutes the daily delight of good gossip among friends! Because there must be mercy, even faith. Tenderness may also be about silence, as stanza four of my poem suggests. For me, it floated forwards from my childhood in a memory of a spring orchard at the family home, ‘bird-saturated’ as I describe it in the poem, but that goes on to flower (I imagine) in my lungs, as breath, as air in a great forest.

And the things we think we’ll never experience, in my case becoming a parent? That too was the great tenderness of my life, when this human arrived ‘capably from the cosmos one January / a freight of tenderness, eagle in spirit.’ It’s good to think of eagles in relation to tenderness, because the eagle prevents tenderness from sinking into any kind of soft option. Far from it, the tenderness I leant into in the writing of this poem is all about the divisionless non-patterning between everything in existence, from the molecular to the huge and visual and distant. We must be tender, co-dependent, and connected.

Around the same time as ‘Tenderness’ found its way out onto the page, the question of the heart, iQ-waves, arrhythmias, and all that jazz, began to preoccupy me. But I wasn’t thinking about the physical aspects of heart, so much as the emotional battering hearts accept in a lifetime. Death, loss, a partner leaving suddenly with no explanation, a partner dying in his sleep, someone else having to have an urgent cardiac bypass after a life well lived and still relatively young—these things mounted up for me. The poem is an attempt to draw the overlay of cardiac matters (with talk of chambers and rhythm and surgeon’s catgut) closer to the overlay of emotional messes that often mark us. So, miraculously, despite heartbreak our hearts somehow beat on! We are no Japanese vase or urn but we might as well have had an artist’s gold-leaf sealing up some of the damage. In reality, the heart continues to weigh up its options, speeding up, slowing, hopping a bit and missing beats here and there as electrical impulses do their sometimes uncertain work. But heart, to me, is also its own language. The point—if there is a point—of the poem is how long it’s taken me to understand how everything in the heart reflects what I call ‘an unsprung story . . . too lately understood.’

That’s the thing about humans. Most of us come to understanding quite late in the day. But I think of my own heart, the imagined one especially, as inscribed with the jagged consequences of the many times I have resisted the ‘tenderness’ of the previous poem, when I have stubbornly banged on as if I were an ‘Übermensch’, forgetting that the original, Nietzschean Übermensch is a self-discovering, self-overcoming human. And the walls of the heart, with its graffiti of destructive and positive event marks, is evidence of this.

Mary O’Donnell’s poetry collections include Unlegendary Heroes, Those April Fevers and Massacre of the Birds. Four novels include Where They Lie and the best-selling debut novel The Light Makers, reissued in 2017 by 451 Editions. Her stories have been published by Stand Magazine, The Fiddlehead Review, The Manchester Review, The French Literary Review, London Magazine, and in the anthology The Glass Shore. She won the Fish International Short Story Competition in 2010. Her essay ‘My Mother in Drumlin Country’ was published in New Hibernia Review and listed among the Notable Essays of 2017 in Best American Essays. She facilitates creative writing courses, reviews books, and also writes for radio. She is a member of Ireland’s affiliation of artists, Aosdana. Her latest short story collection Walking Ghosts is published this month by Mercier Press.

Read a short story by Mary O’Donnell here.