Entering Silence: How to Find a Shark's Tooth in the Desert

A Meditation and Reflection from February, 2025

In these summer throwbacks we are revisiting past meditations and reflections, delivered every Friday at our regular time, 9 am EST.

The following poem by Polish poet Adam Zagajewski (1945-2021), at first, seems to ask for very little. It only requires we try to enter a state of praise. Of course, the poem is asking for much more than mere trying. It challenges us to live deeply and love more ardently not despite but because of mutilating forces. It asks us to enter wholeheartedly a world in ruins.

Try to praise the mutilated world

By Adam Zagajewski

Trans. Clare Cavanaugh

Try to praise the mutilated world.
Remember June's long days,
and wild strawberries, drops of rosé wine.
The nettles that methodically overgrow
the abandoned homesteads of exiles.
You must praise the mutilated world.
You watched the stylish yachts and ships;
one of them had a long trip ahead of it,
while salty oblivion awaited others.
You've seen the refugees going nowhere,
you've heard the executioners sing joyfully.
You should praise the mutilated world.
Remember the moments when we were together
in a white room and the curtain fluttered.
Return in thought to the concert where music flared.
You gathered acorns in the park in autumn
and leaves eddied over the earth's scars.
Praise the mutilated world
and the gray feather a thrush lost,
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes
and returns.

Throughout the poem there are hints of a time before the mutilation started: “Remember the moments when we were together/in a white room and the curtain fluttered.” It’s all carried in the feather of the absent thrush, the suggestion of some greater presence that has now departed. The mutilated world is like the overgrown city of a great, lost civilization. Even language, even letters and sounds are little ruins, little runes that reduce the immensity of experience even as we attempt to describe it. Nevertheless, Zagajewski’s commands slowly steer us toward this world, our moment in time. “Try to praise,” he writes. “You must praise.” “You should praise.” “Praise.” The poet urges us to face a difficult standoff. How do we enjoy the world, how do we praise the world, when it includes these executioners singing, these peoples displaced, “going nowhere?”

First published in The New Yorker on the Monday following 9/11, it was a literally mutilated world outside the windows of the magazine that Monday. It was like the Monday after Guernica, the Monday after Gettysburg, the many Mondays after, down through time. Now we must go back into the world and clear the wreckage again but knowing what we know. As Carolyn Forché wrote, we increasingly come to know, “there is nothing one man will not do to another.”

Shortly after his birth in 1945, Zagajewski’s family were forced to leave their home in Lvov (now Lviv) for western Poland. As refugees, the Lvov they’d left behind took on a mythical presence in their memory. His recollections of the home he’d never known is called “To Go to Lvov,” the masterful, central poem of his Selected Poems in English, Tremor. All of his cities were ruins of the lost Lvov. The Lvov of the soul was with him everywhere.

For this poet, the ruins are all we have. The poem is filled with nettles and exiles and scars. Yet small reminders here and there evoke the other world from which all of this ushered. Kay Ryan speaks of how silence can be found even in noisy cities like a shark’s tooth, pointed and jagged, suddenly surfacing and disappearing again. I think of that shark tooth all the time. I think of how a sudden silence can feel very old, very familiar—like finding a shark tooth, say, in a desert where there is no longer any ocean, no longer any fish. Yet we are standing on the floor of that ocean, and strangely, for a moment, it's all still there.

I remember an evening in the town of Vaclavovice, near the Czech/Slovak border. It was a time before I spoke Czech language. I was brought by a friend to a small party. The town smelled like pungent, yellow coal smoke and cooked meat. White sky. A foot of snow already piled along the empty streets. There was always a snowstorm, or always a few flakes in the air. In a circle along the walls of a wallpapered room, with curtains like the ones Zagajewski describes here, we sat eating little cakes and drinking thick Turkish coffee out of gold-lipped water glasses. No one was speaking. I would have normally broken the silence, but I had nothing to say. I just had nothing to say. I had to sit there. “They only reach the holy who learn to tarry,” Rilke said once. Sinking down into that original silence, like through a passageway into the lost city, where everyone was waiting for me with their cakes and coffee, I first learned how to sit; I first learned how to tarry.

Oars for the Boat

Entering silence can be painful at first. It’s hard to go there, and we may put it off, because to go there is to be made to remember and to recalibrate in ways that our everyday-world-suit is not meant to fit. Meditation for me can sometimes feel—I want to say—embarrassing. When I fully arrive back in it, I immediately remember the posture of understanding, and I wake up like someone who had been hypnotized for an audience on a stage. I see so clearly how I have been operating all my life under a haze, how I have been reacting in fear instead of responding with love.

When I allow myself to fall like this, silence resonates in me. Robert Sardello talks about sympathetic resonance—the way bells turn glasses and windows and tables into objects that ring alongside—and he writes of how we can inversely resonate silence when we are in communion with it. It doesn’t happen every day. No poet writes their life's great poem every day. But we enter each time with open hands, in a pose of reception. That is the purpose of our practice. To simply let the drawbridge down, let the guards go home, and to be with whatever comes, observing how it strays and vanishes and returns.