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Kimberly Grey's poem explores the sweetness and the pain of love, inspired by Genesis 5:2.
Genesis 5:2
System with Some Kindness
By
Kimberly Grey
Credits:
Curated by:
Kent Shaw
2016
Poetry
Primary Scripture
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This passage from Genesis immediately got me thinking about the word "kind" that was attached to the idea of humanity as it was created. And I couldn't help but think: but are we kind? Sometimes, yes, sometimes no. And I immediately thought of lovers, how it seems impossible for two people who have chosen to combine their lives together to be solely kind or solely cruel. There's usually some kind of back and forth between the beloveds. This is what makes the engine go. Keep going. Because I'm working on a series of poems called "systems" (where an idea is repeated in broken down parts or ideas to make some kind of larger statement) I saw that this poem could fit into that project.
The word kind eventually breaks down, becomes kings, kins, rinds, as the larger idea of kindness is explored. I couldn't help but think of Aristophanes' speech about lovers, that human beings were originally round organisms composed of two people joined together. But Zeus chopped each of them in two and now, as a result, the lovers go through life constantly searching for the other person who can make him whole again.
Though it may sound romantic, it's this action of combining two beings that creates difficulty. No person who ever loved another person didn't experience some kind of pain from it. The poem is interested in that pain, in the erasure that occurs when two people attempt to act as one. There will undoubtedly be some kind of suffering and some kindness around the suffering.
Spark Notes
The Artist's Reflection
Kimberly Grey is the author of The Opposite of Light, winner of the 2015 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize and published by Persea Books. Her work has appeared in Tin House, A Public Space, Kenyon Review, Boston Review, Southern Review, and many other journals. She is the recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship and Civitella Ranieri Fellowship and currently teaches creative writing at Stanford University.
Website: www.kimberlyMgrey.com
Kimberly Grey
About the Artist
Kimberly Grey
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Let me state, this will not end kindly. There was a woman and a man, some kind of language between them.
“He created them male and female and blessed them. And he named them “Mankind” when they were created.” Genesis 5:2
System with Some Kindness
by Kimberly Grey
Let me state, this will not end kindly.
There was a woman and a man, some kind
of language between them. It’s easier to tell
the story of what binds than what wounds them –
Said her: Kindly clean your feet, Said him: kindly
find your mind, Said both: would you kindly
mind your fine fine eyes? Who would hope
for this? “I examined you when you were
in the most pain,”
said neither. Both
rinds of leftover fruit, gone and bad. Lovers are not
kings, not kinds of kings, not kins, even. If you pay
attention, you can hear them win
in their losses. They practice, with their contours, a kind
of war: coming together
shape to shape, resembling a geometric
sameness: “love and hate in combination make
an irresistible enemy” – I don’t know who said this
and if they meant it kindly, but what binds
the lovers, what makes them kind, is their
bodies together, the spherical shape the Greeks
ached for. They lay outside of Olympus,
anthropologically unapologetic, mind
to mind, cheek
to cheek, striving for and writhing in this kind
of “ness”:
No lover not loved a little remissed
(erasing the eyes the thighs the feet the lips)
No neck bone broken quickly without it.
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Let me state, this will not end kindly. There was a woman and a man, some kind of language between them.
