Read Down for the Surrender. Read Up for the Way Back.

A poem from April that won't let me go — and a word I keep reaching for in May.

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It is May 14. Almost halfway into another month, and this particular poem will not let me go.

I wrote it three weeks ago, for Day 28 of an April challenge that has since ended. The challenge is over. The poem is not. It sits open on my desktop. I read it some mornings before I read the headlines. I read the devastation. I read the salvation. I read both, because the form only works if you can hold both at the same time.

If any of this is true for you — if you have been reading the headlines and feeling the same weight, the same exhaustion, the same sense that nothing you do is moving anything — keep going. This is for you, too.

Here is the poem. Read it top to bottom, the way you read anything else.

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Reverse

This country has run out of time.

And do not try to tell me

there are still hands willing to do the work.

The receipts have stopped mattering.

It would be a lie to suggest

people are still listening.

We have been left alone with the noise.

I refuse to believe

the truth still has weight.

Silence is what won.

You will never convince me that

what we write still matters.

This is the end of it.

And no one alive will say

tomorrow is something worth keeping.

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Now go back to the bottom of the poem. Read it again — line by line, from the bottom up.

* * *

Tomorrow is something worth keeping.

And no one alive will say

this is the end of it.

What we write still matters.

You will never convince me that

silence is what won.

The truth still has weight.

I refuse to believe

we have been left alone with the noise.

People are still listening.

It would be a lie to suggest

the receipts have stopped mattering.

There are still hands willing to do the work.

And do not try to tell me

this country has run out of time.

* * *

Same words. Opposite country.

Here is what I did not expect, three weeks ago, when I sat down to write it.

I sat down to write the surrender version. I will say it out loud, because there is no point pretending otherwise: I was tired. I was sick with dread and heartsick for my country.

Not the kind of tired or heartsick that sleep fixes. The kind that comes from doing the work — the receipts, the footnotes, the federal register citations, the sourcing — for long enough to start wondering whether the architecture I had built my work on was a story I had been telling myself. If I show them, they will see. That sentence had been the spine of decades of writing. In April I was no longer sure I believed it.

The headlines were accumulating. The Senate going quiet on its own bills. Federal statistical infrastructure being dismantled in plain view of a country that did not seem to be looking. A piece I spent four days on landing with a small splash, and the algorithm moving on. Subscribers ticking up by one, then down by one. The people I had once trusted to push back declining to push back. I was watching it happen, writing it down with full receipts, and waking up the next morning to find that the receipts had not moved a single needle.

That was the feeling. Not a thought. A feeling, in the body. That the silence was winning, and that whatever I had been doing for as long as I had been doing it was no longer doing anything.

So I wrote it. Line by line, I emptied my pockets on the page. This country has run out of time. The receipts have stopped mattering. Silence is what won. I was not performing despair. I was setting down what I had been carrying.

Have you felt this too? Maybe not in receipts and federal register citations — maybe in your own work, your own days, your own quiet accumulation of evidence that what you do is no longer landing. What have you been carrying that you have not quite set down? What is keeping your head above water?

The form would not let me set it down.

The form requires that every line of grief contain its own refusal. That every surrender be readable, in reverse, as resistance. I could not write silence is what won without simultaneously writing the line that becomes, on the second reading, the truth still has weight. I could not write this is the end of it without writing the line that becomes what we write still matters.

I sat down to write the surrender. The form made me write the answer.

What I want to tell you about the second reading — the bottom-up reading — is that it did not feel like discovering an argument. It felt like being caught. It felt like I grabbed a piece of peace on the tip of my pen.

The form had been working over my shoulder the whole time I was writing it. I had been picking my hinges — do not tell me, I refuse to believe, you will never convince me, no one alive will say — without quite paying attention to what they were going to do on the way back up. I had been writing the surrender in good faith. The form had been writing the answer in the same ink, with the same words, all along.

When I read the poem bottom to top, I was not reading a new poem. I was reading the beating heart of part me that had not given up — that had refused, the whole time, to give up — even though the rest of me had been sliding into despair.

The feeling was not relief. The feeling was recognition. The recognition of something I had been carrying alongside the tiredness the whole month — maybe the last year, and had not been able to see, because I had only been reading in one direction.

Succor is the word that has been with me since I finished it.

It is an old word. It comes from the Latin succurrere — to run beneath. To come up under someone who is sinking and hold them, just enough, until they can stand. It is the word my grandmother used. It is the word the King James Bible reaches for when the world has gone wrong and grace is the only thing left to offer. It is not the same as comfort. Comfort says there, there. Succor says I will get under you.

That is what the form has done for me. It has gotten under me.

We are living in a season designed to convince us there is only one direction to read. Down. Down through the headlines. Down through the news alerts. Down through the slow accumulation of evidence that nothing we do matters. The whole architecture of this moment is built to keep us reading in one direction.

The form refuses that. The form insists that the same words, in the other order, mean the opposite thing. That the despair and the answer are made of identical material. That you cannot write one without writing the other — you can only choose which way you read it.

Now the marveling.

The two contemporary poems that made this form famous were written by two of the most unlikely people imaginable.

The first was Brian Bilston, who has been called the Poet Laureate of Twitter and the Banksy of poetry, and who, for years, no one could identify — an anonymous figure behind a cloud of pipe smoke in a stock-photo author portrait. He published Refugees on his blog in March of 2016. He calls these poems forwardsy-backwardsy, which is his coinage and probably the best name for them. Read top to bottom, Refugees is the language of the resentful nativist: they have no need of our help, so do not tell me, these haggard faces could belong to you or me, should life have dealt a different hand. Read bottom to top, it is the language of welcome. Same lines. Asked years later by a class of British schoolchildren whether he would write more of them, Bilston said: they’re hard to write so not sure I’ll be penning any more. He had cracked the form open and then walked away from it, as you might walk away from a lock you have just picked.

The second was Chanie Gorkin, a teenager in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, doing a homework assignment. She was sixteen. The subject the teacher had assigned was The Worst Day Ever. She drew on Chabad philosophy — moach shalit al halev, the discipline of the intellect governing the heart — and turned in a poem that reads top to bottom as a teenager’s despair and bottom to top as the same teenager’s faith. Worst Day Ever? was published on PoetryNation, languished for a year, and then someone spotted it pinned to the wall of a bar in North London and tweeted a photograph of it. It went around the world before she had finished the twelfth grade.

A grown man writing under a pseudonym. A sixteen-year-old girl writing for class credit. Two reverso poems, written four years apart, by people who did not know each other and who lived nothing alike. Both built architectures so technically brutal that the form barely exists outside their handful of attempts.

The originality is not just that they wrote them. The originality is that the form worked — that the hinges held, that the doors swung, that the despair really did become the answer when you read it the other way. That is not a craft trick. That is a structural argument that grief contains its own refutation, and the only labor required of the reader is the labor of changing direction.

I sat down to attempt one because Ramon Carty, who runs Ramrock’s Rhyme & Reason in partnership with The Root System Review, set it as the Day 28 prompt of his April 30 for 30 National Poetry Month challenge. His brief was one sentence: write a poem that makes complete sense read top to bottom, and complete sense — with the exact opposite meaning — read bottom to top. He did not call it succor. He called it an experiment in constraint. I have come to think those are the same thing.

You do not have to write one to receive what the form is offering. You only have to read mine twice. Or pull down Bilston, or Gorkin. Or take any sentence you have been carrying around as a verdict — this is the end of it, the receipts have stopped mattering, tomorrow is not worth keeping — and turn it over. Read it the other direction. See what is written on the back.

It is May 14. The April challenge is over. Most of the writers who joined it have moved on to other projects. I have not moved on from this one. Three weeks in, I am still turning the poem over, as you turn over a old, smooth stone in your pocket on a hard day to remind yourself that you are still inside your own life.

The bottom-up reading is the one I trust.

The bottom-up reading is the one I am keeping.

And tomorrow — to read it the way the form taught me — is something worth keeping. —G

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