I remember how much I needed poems when my children were born. Or, on the other side of life’s swing, I needed poems when the war in Ukraine started, and I was lost for words, trying to turn the chaos in my head into thoughts, if not into a balm. I also feel the deep need for poems when seasons change, on birthdays, at celebrations, and during holidays. Like nothing else in the world, poems allow us to hold onto life’s pivotal, liminal points: we may feel speechless, but a poem’s words ring out, bring sense and beauty to the moment, and perhaps even sanctify it, as a ritual might. In this column, which I have entitled “You Need a Poem,” and further installments, I will feature poems the moment is calling for: the poems I need, which you might need as well.

Tikkun Leil Shavuot—the tradition of staying up all night reading and studying Jewish texts on the eve of Shavuot—might just be the one Jewish ritual I adore without any reservations. It involves unstructured, community-led learning, staying up late talking and thinking about the transcendent. (Drinking coffee and eating cheesecake at all hours doesn’t hurt either.) The theme of revelation, which the holiday commemorates, is spiritual and esoteric but it gets enacted in an intellectual manner as texts are received, discussed, and internalized. “Revelation”, admittedly, is a prohibitive, difficult word, but the learning and the convivial atmosphere bring it down to earth a bit.

Denise Levertov, a poet who has written extensively on spiritual experience and often draws from Biblical and Hasidic teachings, sees revelation as both transcendent and dream-like yet oddly concrete. In her 1961 poem “The Jacob’s Ladder,” (from the New Directions collection with the same name) she envisions the transcendent path:

The stairway is not
a thing of gleaming strands
a radiant evanescence
for angels’ feet that only glance in their tread, and
need not touch the stone.

It is of stone.
A rosy stone that takes
a glowing tone of softness
only because behind it the sky is a doubtful,
a doubting night gray.

A stairway of sharp
angles, solidly built.
One sees that the angels must spring
down from one step to the next, giving a little
lift of the wings:

and a man climbing
must scrape his knees, and bring
the grip of his hands into play. The cut stone
consoles his groping feet. Wings brush past him.
The poem ascends.

Perhaps the most striking image of the poem is the “doubtful, / a doubting night gray” sky. Rather than the “pitch black” darkness that is often invoked in poems and myths, the sky here is of a far more realistic shade, one we are most accustomed to actually seeing: that liminal dark-gray color, in which shapes and people might be discerned but are easily misidentified. Levertov’s night-sky is both “doubtful” and “doubting”, as if given the agency to think on its own. Through that thinking, it comes to question its own existence—the same way a human staring at the sky might. The “doubt” here is endemic to the spiritual experience itself: the skepticism that comes, almost inevitably, by way of talking and thinking, about such an experience.

Levertov imagines the stairway as “solidly built”, which is puzzling: the poem suggests the existence of a well-worn spiritual path, one that has been walked by others, and that is always there, honed and furnished, waiting for us. The sky around it may be fraught with doubt, but the stairway is solid. Can the spiritual experience be quite so defined? Or is the poem suggesting that the ancestral text, the story of Jacob’s ladder, is itself a passage upwards? Is this about the act of reading the tradition, struggling with its sharp edges, step by step, and making it one’s own—just as Levertov is doing here, creating her own midrashic reimagining?

There is a kind of faith in this poem—not only in the spiritual quest but also in the meaning-making. The year Levertov wrote “The Jacob’s Ladder” was also the year of a well-known trial in Jerusalem, which Levertov reflected on in her poem “Eichmann Trial”, describing the heinous criminal as “an apparition // telling us something he / does not know: we are members // one of another.” It is a poet’s verdict: sharp, scintillant, and brave. Clearly, Levertov believes that it is possible to find words for the unspeakable and respond to life’s most impossible moments; that the poetic contemplation of history, just like her contemplation of the sacred myth, can culminate in an insight.

After all, the culmination of the “Jacob’s Ladder” is the poem, as the final line attests. But it isn’t the writing: the poem “ascends” rather than descends, it is neither given nor revealed. Rather, it moves higher than the person “climbing” can reach—as a prayer might, or at least hopes to.

Rachel Mennies, a contemporary poet, whose incredible book “The Naomi Letters” was published last year by BOA Editions, has a very different approach to spiritual moments. “The Naomi Letters” is a set of epistolary fragments, addressed to the poet’s muse named Naomi. These letters are laced with desire—sometimes it is a desire for human companionship, other times it is explicitly erotic, other times it is numinous. We do not know whether Naomi is a real person or a textual mirage. References to Jewish holidays and Hebrew texts appear throughout the book, and Naomi’s name itself can’t be read without the Biblical resonance it carries. Yet, if Biblical Naomi was the addressee of the famous “Wherever you go, I go” phrase, the Naomi of Mennies’s poems moves in the opposite direction. She seems to be everywhere the poet’s imagination goes: whenever the poem appears, it finds Naomi there.

In one such letter, with a date for its title, “February 20, 2017”, the poem describes an ascent, radically different from Levertov’s:

A stack of books sits to my right and another to my left at my writing desk.
One stack reads Wrecks.
The other reads Odes.
Beyond the window our god will write nothing until the sun rises.
I do not understand my role at this desk, Naomi.
The ritual unchanged for years, the streets beyond the window unchanged.
I once thought aging was more like climbing a mountain than unfolding your unread letter.
I thought the view evolved the higher my legs took me.
That the air cooled you at certain altitudes – might easy the body, lull the limbs.
Instead I wake with a turning fist between my legs, another in my teeth.
The wind beyond the window disordering my pages.

Here, instead of a single, well-crafted ladder, we see two stacks of books, rising upwards: one is the collection of praise, the otherInenumerates destructions. But which is the right pathway for the poet, seated at her desk between them? “I do not understand my role,” she confesses. Unlike Levertov’s protagonist, she does not climb, but is stuck, paralyzed in her place. Her own book, one that we find ourselves inside of, is lyrical, and personal: she neither joins the ode’s chorus, nor speaks of the world’s wreckage. Her praise is for Naomi’s shadow; her wreckage is her own.

Rachel Mennies NASTASIA MORA