Darlene Young introduces “Here”

Darlene Young introduces her new poetry collection, Here (BCC Press, 2023).

This is life is pretty messy. I’m hoping that heaven will not be as messy, though I no longer believe in the airy, fleecy-cloud heaven I believed in as child (being heavily influenced by the light-strewn clouds in the background of that famous picture of Christ’s Second Coming). After the years we’ve had (pandemic, crazy and divisive politics, wars and rumors of wars), who isn’t looking forward to the ways that Jesus will clean things up and mend this world?

But we’re here now. Stuck in this crazy world, there must be a way to not only retain our sanity, but even enjoy our lives, messy as they are. I think God wants us to.

Writing poetry is my way of falling in love with the details of the world. Poetry is a place where abstract concepts (the love of a mother for her son, for example) must be translated into concrete specifics—into details that people recognize—in order to create a relatable experience for the reader. In this way, I think that poetry and religion are similar.

Religion—in my case, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—is where heaven, in all its abstract glory, touches ground. It’s where the sacred (principles, potential) meets the mundane (the stench of a sweaty body shoveling snow from a neighbor’s driveway).  It’s the space where we humans, with both divine potential and mortal limitations, get to play dress-up, practicing at godliness. We fumble around, having in our minds the vision of what we’re aiming for, having had glimpses of fire and spirit and the lightning of God’s glory, and yet being cumbered by these clunky bodies that are subject to disease, fatigue, hormones, and even the whims of blood sugar. It’s no wonder that relationships within families, within ward communities, within cultures and nations, feel only rarely like Zion and more often like bumping along a dirt road in an old Buick with three worn tires and a spare: ka-thunk, ka-thunk.

But I think that the fact that we are bumping along is wonderful. I love this liminal space that is a religious life. I am enchanted by all its holy and messy juxtapositions. In my new book, Here (BCC Press), I write about the hard things in life—even some of the aspects of our culture that are complicated—because I believe that telling the truth about difficulty makes the truths I tell about beauty and light more believable. Doing so is my way of bearing testimony that the gospel is good news not in spite of but because of the fact that it touches messy ground.

Here are some of the themes—messy and celebratory—that I address in my book: church service, scripture stories juxtaposed with real life, parenting, marriage, aging, politics. But also, taking joy in whatever ways we can along the way. I believe in noticing and bearing witness of small pleasures, like Chinese takeout on date night or the birds that wake me up in the morning. The beautiful details of this life function like manna for me, enabling me to make it through another day, and then another day. In the Book of Mormon, Mormon says, “There were divers ways that [God] did manifest things unto the children of men, which were good” (Moroni 7:24). He’s talking about the ways that God helps the world know of the mission of Jesus Christ, but I take to heart his encouragement to pay attention to the ways, large and small, that God works in the world. Writing and sharing poetry is my way of doing that.

Prayer Language

We are to add est and eth to every verb, a tradition

leftover from a time when the words

meant dearest, love of my life. Now,

they are meant to make the language holy

(sacred, not secret), set apart

like a sabbath. Thou art. Apparently, I shouldn’t love you

the same way I love gelato or the call

of a chickadee on a lonely afternoon,

as if they weren’t the same thing.

At church, children and newcomers

talk to you straight out, not yet suspecting

how strange this sounds to us long-time worshippers,

how exciting. Once they realize, they blush and stutter,

adding letters indiscriminately.

I’m done with it.

It’s like wearing boxing gloves for our thumb-matches, God,

and I won’t have it. Thou art puts you in the sky somewhere,

and the sky is only half the story. You

are my hero and my nemesis and everything

in between. You are my heartbeat

and distant drums, my breath

and the glamorous squabble of aspen and spruce

on the mountainside. You abide

like the sequels of blockbusters, all of them

with you in the title: “Return of.” “Revenge of.”

You are subject and object, rain and blood.

Darling.

(First published in Wayfare magazine.)

---

Darlene Young is a poet and essayist who teaches creative writing in the BYU English Department. Her first poetry collection, Homespun and Angel Feathers (BCC Press) won the 2019 AML Poetry Award. She was honored with the 2022 Smith-Pettit Foundation Award for Outstanding Contribution to Mormon Letters. She has served as the poetry editor for both Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought and Segullah, and she is the founder of the “MoPoWriMo” (Mormon Poetry Writing Month) group. She lives in South Jordan, Utah.